The Aristotle Transposition
by pollywantsa
Summary: There are many paths to Arcadia. (2013 movie-verse.)
1. Part 1

Thanks to Helen Fayle for the prompt (and the push… and the shove….). And to reflect her words right back at her… _be careful what you wish for..._

* * *

 **The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part one)**

* * *

It was like somebody had a stick and was poking me. Hard. Hard… and all the way through. An incessant digging at my side, piercing the skin and the meat and pushing splinters deep into the wall of my chest.

 _Poke._

I breathed. It burned. A pain so intense it stopped the air in my lungs. Made me gasp and open my eyes.

That burned too.

I closed my eyes, turned my head away from the lamp that was angled into my face and opened them to the dark that closed down beyond the circle of yellow light. I was on my back, sprawled across a desk with my legs loose over one end and my head resting half on a cracked data pad. I knew it was cracked, because I could hear the screen crunching beneath the back of my head. Being stretched out like this on the desk was unexpected. I didn't remember how I got onto the desk. I didn't remember how I got into the site office. I didn't remember how I got this goddamned stick poked into my side. Last I remembered…

 _Shit._

Last I remembered was the attack. The mine being overrun by claimjumpers. The explosive burn of an energy weapon point blank into my ribs.

I groped fingers, trembling, toward the hole in my side, groaned as pain blasted through me and felled my hand like a bird mid-flight. The hand dropped heavy, like a dead thing, onto my chest.

'You took a hit,' a voice said, out of the dark.

That made my eyes move, the head following suit until I was blinded again by the light of the lamp.

'Who – ' I ground out, hoping it wasn't one of the claimjumpers back to finish the job they'd started.

'It's bad,' the voice said.

I grunted. An animal sound as sweat bloomed cold across my skin.

'You'll probably die,' the stranger said. Sighed. Shifted in the office chair he had positioned just out of the light. Two long legs stretched momentarily into the circle of yellow, sheathed to the knees in well-worn boots.

I sucked in air, gritted my teeth against the pain and started again. 'Who are you?'

Silence. The sound of slow breathing in the dark.

I raised my head and grimaced down at my chest. My shirt had been torn down the middle, the skin beneath it smeared and crusted with black. A makeshift bandage clung precariously to the wound, dark and heavy with clotted blood. My head dropped back to the desk, back to the shifting glass of the broken data pad. There was no stick in my side. There never had been a stick. It had only felt like a stick, poking and poking and poking…

 _Poke._

'You fix me up?' I asked.

I could almost hear the shoulders shrug.

'I guess I should thank you,' I said. I moved. I tried to move. Floundered like a dying fish across the rubble of the desk.

'I'd stay put,' he said, making no move to keep me down on the desk, or to help me get up, either.

I floundered again, felt something pop beneath the bandage, grimaced as blood dripped hot onto the desk beneath my back. But still, I was moving.

The chair rolled further back into the dark.

Ten minutes it took, or so it felt, to struggle into sitting under the gaze of that silent audience, the shadow waiting just beyond the light, watching me with the veins popping out in my forehead, the sweat dripping from my face, chest heaving with effort and my skin turning white from the pain. Just as breakfast was making its second appearance I made it upright, panting, my legs over the edge of the desk, a hand clamped hard against the seeping bandage and all my concentration on willing the blood to stop flowing. I gritted my teeth and then moved, darted my free hand to angle the desk-lamp toward the stranger.

Too slow.

He rolled the chair away again, just out of the light.

My fingers fell defeated from the lamp, bloody prints smeared wet across the anodised metal. But it was enough. There was enough light to illuminate the longish hair, the dark flight suit, the weapon holstered at the stranger's hip. Yellow highlighted one side of his face, dim, but enough to see the scar that snaked wickedly down the exposed cheek, the lips curving slowly into a satisfied smile, the faint glimmer of one visible eye.

'Hmm,' he said. He seemed pleased.

'Who are you,' I challenged again, voice thick around the nausea, eyes riveted on the smiling lips.

The eye glinted again in the dark, as though the stranger was thinking. Considering. But there was never going to be an answer.

'Why are you here?' It hurt to talk, but it was my job to ask. Correction: used to be my job to ask. I glanced through the office door, shattered off its hinges. Beyond it the auxiliary lights flickered dimly, outlining the forms that slumped against the walls, sprawled limp across the floor, arms and legs and smears of dark blood littering the passageway beyond.

The stranger followed my gaze, the smile gone, the mouth serious. 'What happened here?'

'You don't know?' I wanted to laugh at the obtuseness of the question when the answer was so blindingly obvious.

He shrugged again in the half-light. 'I arrived late.'

'You're telling me you had nothing to do with – '

'I told you – ' the head shook once in negation, the hair lank and soft and twisting in the half-light, ' – I arrived late.'

'Then why – '

'I was looking for something,' he said.

I moved, grunted, tried hard not to breathe. 'You find it?'

He nodded, the movement subtle in the dark. 'Buried deep.'

'And now what?'

'Now there's you.'

I looked again at the bodies outside the door. 'Anyone else…?' I asked, but I knew it was beyond hope. My eyes dropped to the blood-smeared floor.

'Nobody,' he said, with the indifference creeping back into his voice. 'I looked.'

'Doesn't matter. I'll be dead soon anyway.' I looked up at him. 'You said.'

'I said.' He rose from the chair and moved into the light, tall and rangy with the muscles moving like water under the form-fit of his leathers. 'But you don't have to die. There's something on my ship that can heal you.'

'Your ship?' I blinked up at him. Only the ore ships were capable of making it this far out into the territories. And the Coalition fleet. But the Coalition never bothered patrolling the mining worlds. They left us to our own devices and our own petty squabbles, and if wars were fought over holes in the ground and if people died digging minerals for the prosperity of the almighty Gaia Sanction, so be it. They didn't care. Nobody did.

I looked again at the bodies in the hall, knew it was simply a matter of time before the claimjumpers returned to consolidate their hard-won property, if they weren't out there doing so already. And if I was still alive when they returned, they'd soon make sure I wasn't.

The stranger moved closer and more of the light played on his face, and I could see that aside from the roping scar a black patch covered the place where his right eye had once been.

'Name,' he said, with an unexpected authority behind his voice.

What the hell.

'Ari,' I said. And then I said, because he'd asked me my name and because my mother had given it to me and if I was going to die I wanted to say it out loud this one, last time, 'Aristotle.'

A smile played across his face.

I looked at him, at his one good eye, and saw that despite the smile there was a sadness in him, a chasm that cut through his heart. One thing you learned in the outworlds was to recognise pain. We all had holes in our hearts.

'Aristotle.' He reached out a hand and I clasped it with my own, let him ease me from the desk and into standing, his body strong and firm when I sagged against it. And then he said, as though it were a promise and curse both, 'will you come aboard my ship?'

* * *

He carried me to the surface more than helped me, arm hard around my waist as he dragged me stumbling, the strength in that one arm lifting me bodily over the debris and the bodies of the fallen. I was no lightweight, taller than the average and all hard-packed muscle, but he made it seem easy, even when I faltered over faces I knew too well, my legs suddenly become heavy and my feet refusing to move.

In the end I had to stop looking at the faces. Let him guide me through the litter of the dead, through the maze of rock-hewn passages, some lit, some blacker even than night, and back out onto the pocked surface of the planet. By the time we made it I was panting, my breath heaving in gasps and my skin as cold and pale as wax. It was freezing up here, but the stranger didn't seem to feel the cold, didn't notice the wind biting and spitting dust into our mouths and our eyes. He paused only to look at the two tiny suns – one dead and one slowly dying – where they hovered wan upon the horizon.

Maybe I passed out then. I must have passed out. I remembered feeling cold and then hot and then I came to inside his little transport, strapped into the co-pilot's chair and him standing over me with an empty pressure hypo in his hand.

'What –?' I blinked warily up at him.

He turned away, dropped the syringe back into the medpack on the floor, closed the lid and stowed it efficiently into a cubby beneath the console. There was no wasted movement with this guy. And definitely no wasted conversation.

I watched as he engaged the drive and we lifted off from the surface, the view outside the port canting from the horizon to the sky. The blast shields abruptly lowered, cutting off my last view of Muerte's aptly-named surface and the dead and dying suns. I felt sick again, nauseous, the upward thrust of the ship raising havoc in my head, the cold sick feeling exacerbated by the buffeting of the transport in the hard and razing wind.

'What …' I coughed pathetically, cleared my throat and tried to take my mind off the spinning in my head, '…were you looking for?'

Silence. And then – 'A node.'

'A node? What is that? Like…' I coughed again and tasted blood. '…a rock?'

'No.' He looked at me sideways. 'It's... time.'

'A node.' I shifted in the seat. 'Of time.'

'A Time Node,' he corrected, his fingers playing in precise patterns across the console.

The wind pounded harder against the transport as we moved higher into the atmosphere, but the nausea was fading. I wondered what was in the hypodermic. 'What exactly is a Time Node?'

'A locus in Time and Space.' He turned to look fully at me, fixed me with that one good eye. 'The pins that hold the universe together.'

'And you're looking for them.' I was feeling better now, whatever it was he'd given me was doing its work. 'Why? So you can pull the universe apart?'

It was a joke, a lame one, and there was no reply. He turned away, leaving me with the sound of the engines, the faint pinging of the console, the sudden silence on the hull as the wind stopped moving outside and we broke free of atmosphere.

'I need to find them,' he said unexpectedly, his need sounding large in that tiny, confined space.

I shifted in my seat, one hand loosening the restraints as the artificial gravity kicked in. I studied his profile, what I could see of it, the skin of his face clear and smooth but marred irrevocably by the jagged scar that tracked from his nose to his cheek. My head lolled back against the headrest. It was too soon to be talking about needs. All I needed was distraction, something to keep my mind off the fact that, despite how good I was feeling, I was slowly bleeding out. 'And you find these nodes on planets?'

'On planets.' He leaned back in his seat. 'Inside planets. Sometimes they're situated in space, just… floating.' His voice darkened a shade. 'It's why they're so difficult to find. Why it's taking me so long…'

I would have asked him how long, only I could hear the years in his voice.

He glanced sideways at me and crooked the corner of his mouth. His fingers moved on the console and the blast shield fell away and I saw his ship, a great black behemoth filling the forward view, and it took my breath away.

* * *

Two men waited for us on the hangar deck, one dark-haired and goateed, the other round-bellied and bespectacled and with his mouth hanging open, staring irritated at the stranger like a mother who's kid has just brought home another stray animal for her to feed.

'Maji,' the stranger said to the dark-haired man. 'Medbay.'

'Aye,' Maji said, coming forward and reaching out a steadying hand. Maji was shorter than the stranger, not as strong, and I felt him sag momentarily as my weight transferred into his arms. I smelled oil on him, saw it greased in streaks along the front of his clothes as he shunted me towards a nearby passageway.

Behind me there was a rumbling from the other man, a grumble that I wasn't sure wasn't about me. And then I heard the stranger's voice cutting the grumbling down. 'Yattaran. Prepare to deploy the oscillator.'

'Wait,' I said, pulling against Maji. He stopped, sighed, then helped me to limp back around. 'You're going back down?' I said to the stranger.

He turned to look at me.

'The claimjumpers,' I continued. 'They'll be back. You'll need more than the two of you. You – '

A smile edged one corner of his mouth. 'They won't be a problem,' he said.

'Eh? What's this about claimjumpers – ' Yattaran started, but the stranger's mouth set in a thin line and he turned a steel-hard eye on him.

'Power up the deployment module,' he said, the words a warning as much as they were a command.

Yattaran shook his head. He ran a hand from the back of his scalp to the front of it. 'Claimjumpers,' he muttered disgustedly before stomping off towards a larger transport.

* * *

Maji shunted me into the corridor. The walls were steel-grey, the lighting dim. Pipes and conduits snaked out from random intersections and disappeared just as randomly again. Now and again the passage opened up and levels above and below could be seen, the steel-mesh of gantries sparking dully in the ambient light, and then the walls closed back in around us. The halls were deserted. Quiet except for the gentle pulse of the engines and the atmosphere hissing lazily from vents spaced at intervals along the walls. There was a distinct smell of ozone in the air. The scent of lightning after a storm.

'What's his name?' I asked, and Maji huffed out air in surprise.

'He didn't tell you?' He laughed, a short high laugh, muttered 'nothing surprises me anymore,' then pulled us up in the corridor. He looked at me and said, seriously, 'his name is Harlock. Captain Harlock,' all the while watching my face for any sign of recognition. But I'd been too far out in the territories for far too long and I could only look back at him blankly.

Maji shook his head when I showed no sign of recognition. 'Early days,' he said, his arm shifting around me and tugging me higher into position. 'Come on. You're probably healing already, but a night in the medbay won't hurt.'

* * *

Yattaran rolled a stool out from beneath a bench and spun it across the medbay towards the pallet I was propped up in. He sat himself heavily on the cushion, the springs groaning audibly as he made himself comfortable, folded his arms atop his belly and leaned forward over the bed to peer at the blaster hole in my side. 'Ah,' he said. 'You won't even feel that by morning.'

I looked down at the wound. It was healing, though god knows how – Maji had only cleaned it and told me to leave it out where the air could get at it. But the way he'd said 'air' was odd, and when he said it he'd looked superstitiously at the walls the way a man looks at a black cat when it crosses his path. If he'd thrown a pinch of salt over his shoulder I wouldn't have been surprised.

'How…?' I asked, because things were happening that I didn't understand. I could practically feel the flesh healing. A tight, prickling, itching. And there were twinges of movement, as though something was crawling beneath the skin.

Apparently Yattaran didn't understand it either. 'It's the dark matter,' he said. 'It powers the ship. Turns out it has regenerative properties as well. As long as you're aboard _Arcadia_ you'll heal. Thing is,' he leaned slightly forward, 'we don't know how it works. Once you've been contaminated with the dark matter does it stay in you forever? Or does it only affect you when you're on board the ship?' He laughed, a deep throaty rumble. 'The only way to test the theory is for somebody to go dirtside and cut off an arm, or maybe a head, and see if it grows back.' He leaned closer to me and I smelled the sour tang of wine on his breath. 'How about it? Want to give it a try?' He grinned slyly and leaned back on the stool. 'You'll stay here tonight. Tomorrow you can choose a room. Captain says. There are plenty of officers' quarters available.'

I found the way he said that last bit disturbing. 'What happened to the officers?'

He shrugged. 'Gone.'

'Gone. You mean dead?'

'Seems that way.' He shrugged again, his folded arms still resting high on his stomach. 'That's our theory, Maji and me. We still find their stuff now and then. Their personal effects, know what I'm saying?'

'So I'm staying, then?'

'Captain says.' He twisted a little on the stool, the cushion spinning idly and the springs giving a small creak. A finger lifted to his face and he pushed at his glasses, moved them higher up on his face. 'Captain doesn't let you aboard if he doesn't plan for you to stay.'

I shifted on the bed, hoisted myself further upright and settled gingerly back. If I was staying I supposed I needed to find a few things out. 'How many officers are there now?'

He took the hand he was using to push at his glasses and raised it into the air between us. 'Let's see. Besides Captain,' he raised one finger, 'there's Maji,' he raised another finger, 'and me.' He raised a third finger. 'Three.' He kept the fingers in the air. 'And Miimé,' he added as an afterthought. Another finger went into the air. 'Four.'

Was he kidding me? 'And how many crew?'

Three of the fingers disappeared, leaving only one. 'Just you.' He leaned forward and patted me reassuringly on the arm. 'But Captain's currently recruiting.'

His hand was warm against my skin, and faintly clammy. The odour of the wine was strong, as though he must have spilled some of it on his shirt.

'And,' he said, by way of consolation, 'Captain says you can have an officer's berth. That's good, hey? Means you're already in line for promotion.'

Promotion? I felt like this was the butt-end of a joke and I had somehow missed the punchline. 'Are you telling me there are only four of you running this ship?'

'Ah.' The arms returned to their position on his stomach. 'Nobody's running the ship. It runs by itself.'

I looked at him, at the stubble on his chin, at the too-moist lips, at the spectacles so thick they looked like the cut-off ends of a pair of shot-glasses. At this stage in our relationship he wasn't exactly inspiring confidence.

'There's no such thing as a self-guiding ship,' I said. 'Where did it come from? Who made it? How – '

'Exactly!' he said, another of the stubby fingers rising into the air to shut me down. 'Who _did_ make it? Beneath the surface it's Gaia. It's all Gaia.'

I blinked at him.

'Coalition,' he specified. And then he hissed with conspiratorial urgency, _'this was a Coalition ship.'_

I looked around me, at the dark walls, the organic feel of the medical stations. The off-kilter organisation of the diagnostic systems, as though they hadn't been made for human hands. And I remembered the exterior of the ship, the gnarled, other-worldly sweep of her lines, the metal-black skin moulded close on a framework of hard bones.

This couldn't be Coalition tech. It didn't even look human.

'You don't have to believe me,' he said, seeing the look on my face, 'but I've spent months inside this ship's mainframe. I don't know who created the interface, but underneath it all it's Coalition. This was a battleship. One of the _Deathshadow_ class from what, ninety, a hundred years ago.'

'But…weren't they all destroyed?'

'The Homecoming War.' He nodded sagely. 'That's what the history books say.'

'Then how…. where, did Harlock get it?'

'That's the thing.' He leaned close and lowered his voice, as if the walls could hear. _'Harlock's always been the captain.'_

I stared at him. I'd known him barely half a day and he was spinning me tales like this?

'Couldn't be.' I said. 'It must be the name that's the same. His father was captain, maybe. A grandfather.'

Yattaran's head cocked to one side and he shook his head in a slow, deliberate _no._ 'I located the service records and the biometrics are the same. _Identical. '_

'How is that even possible?'

In answer he nodded towards the wound at my side, the knitting edges exposed and pink in the air. 'That's not possible, either. Who says the dark matter couldn't keep a person alive forever, healing them, duplicating their cells over and over and over…' His voice trailed away as he contemplated the possibilities. 'I suppose we'll find out,' he said distractedly, as if just awakening from a dream, 'if we stay aboard long enough.'

That was one almighty 'if.'

I reached for the blanket and pulled it up to my waist, settled it gingerly around the mending wound. 'You said you found the service records.' I was feeling cold, of a sudden. 'What else did you find?'

'Ah.' He sat back in sudden irritation, his voice returning to normal levels. 'Nothing. The deeper I go the more this ship holds me back.' He leaned forward again and whispered, _'it's got a damned mind of its own.'_

* * *

That night I saw a ghost.

I dozed fitfully on the medbay pallet, waking as the wound moved and pulsed and now and then exploded with a pain that jolted me from my sleep. The bastard hurt. It itched. It tickled. It crawled. There was a lot of ground to cover, a lot of burned flesh for the scar tissue to inch painstakingly across, and it seemed I could feel every unnatural moment of its slow, disturbing creep.

I tasted ozone on the air, my lips tingling with it so that I licked at them constantly and was rubbing forever at my stinging eyes. Whatever it was that was in the air it seemed there was more of it in here, concentrated and prickling and crawling across my skin. In the dim cool of the ship's night I almost expected sparks to fly from my fingertips.

And one time, when the wound moved suddenly and jerked me out of my sleep I awoke to find the ghost, leaning silently over me.

I did nothing. Didn't move, didn't jump, didn't scream, didn't care. I was dead tired and half dead and this ship was full of mystery, and if it came with ghosts as well I wouldn't have been surprised.

So I lay there, unmoving, my eyes slitted open in the half light as I stared into her cool, pale face.

Maybe she was a dream. She was beauty and light and as translucent as the rarest of gems. She was draped in gauze that shimmered and moved and there were fireflies, dancing, in her hair. She settled on the edge of the bed and leaned herself forward, a pale moon rising only inches from my face.

Eyes the lightest of green moved across me, pupils narrowing into slits as she studied my features, looked at my hair where it sprouted from my head, her gaze tracking the line of my nose, my cheek, my mouth. She peered into my eyes, as though they were jewels she had never seen before. She leaned close and closer, inhaled deep, and I felt her testing me, tasting me, _knowing_ me.

I swallowed, licked my lips and tried not to breathe.

And then she was gone, her weight lifted from the bed and the fireflies spinning out into nothing.

I was alone again, in the dark. Around me the diagnostic consoles blinked and pinged, unwelcome interruptions in the otherwise silent room.

* * *

I followed Yattaran through the maze of passageways. Left, right, down one level, then down another. Everywhere were the pipes and conduits, sinuous and organic like the arterial network of a live thing, and I fancied I could hear a heartbeat pulsing rhythmically beneath the steady hum of the engines. We crossed one of the inexplicable chasms that opened up at random intersections and I paused on the crosswalk, looked first up and then down into a deep, dark abyss. And then Yattaran was hurrying me along.

'Mess one floor up,' he was saying, 'crew quarters one floor down. Officers' quarters this level. Captain's rooms upper decks rear, in the sterncastle.'

I'd seen the sterncastle on the approach the day before. It had struck me as incongruous, the dark and heavy forepart of _Arcadia_ morphing unexpectedly in her rear-quarters into metal crafted to look as light as wood. I had a sudden memory of Captain Hook's sailing ship from the picture books my mother had carted with her Plato and her Aristotle from one dying world to the next. Although in this case Harlock was less Captain Hook and more the boy who never grew up… the man, if Yattaran was to be believed, who would never grow old.

An intersection loomed ahead at cross-angles, a sudden drifting light floating across it and into our field of view.

The ghost.

I froze, riveted, staring at the apparition, at the long sweep of softly-moving hair, the delicate drifting gauze, the pale green eyes turning slowly and deliberately in my direction. The lips smirked silently, and there was a knowing in that smirk. I felt strangely violated. Ashamed. Embarrassed of my hard and heavy human self. And then the vision was gone.

'Hey.' Yattaran had stopped walking.

'Did you see that?' I stared in the direction the apparition had taken.

'See what?'

'The ghost.'

He erupted into laughter. Maniacal but brief. He glanced in the direction the ghost had taken. 'There are ghosts on this ship,' he said, his eyes back on mine and suddenly all seriousness, 'but Miimé aint one of them.'

'Miimé,' I repeated, remembering the name from the day before.

'She's Captain's…' He closed his mouth. Opened it again. 'I don't know what she is. But she controls the dark matter engine so I suppose she's an engineer. Like Maji.'

He turned and continued on his original trajectory, one hand waving in the air and words still coming out of his mouth, but they were like waves crashing against an unthinking shore. I was still staring down the corridor, waiting, maybe, for another glimpse of that cool, ethereal beauty.

'Hey!' He had stopped walking again. 'You hear me?'

I shook my head _no,_ the admission eliciting an exaggerated sigh as he waited for me to catch up.

'You're free to go anywhere on the ship,' he started again, 'but Captain asks only three places you don't. One,' he raised a familiar stubby finger into the air, 'Captain's quarters. Two,' another finger was raised, 'central computer room. And three,' a third finger went into the air, 'science lab on level sixteen.'

He stopped abruptly and turned to a door set flush in the wall, pressed a sweaty palm against the access panel. The door slid silently aside. 'Ah,' he said, surveying the interior. 'Smells nice. How about this one?'

I leaned forward to look in. Officers' quarters weren't as large as I had expected, but it contained a bed without bedding, a side table, a small bureau, a recessed closet. And according to Yattaran it was mine.

'Looks good,' I said, stepping over the threshold. Really, it was great.

He nudged me further into the room. 'There's bedding in the Supply on the lower decks. Clothing too. Anything you need just help yourself. Captain says.'

I turned to look at him. I wasn't used to accepting charity… not that this was all charity, since it seemed I'd soon be working for it. But I needed to say something.

'Yattaran,' I said. 'I, ah…'

'Ahhh.' He took a short step back, a hand raised to halt my words. 'No no no, not me. Thank Captain. He makes the decisions.'

'Alright,' I said, 'but how do I thank him?'

He looked at me, his eyes glinting behind the smudged lenses of his glasses. 'With loyalty.'

* * *

I found the communal bathroom, locked the door, stripped off my blood-crusted clothes and surveyed the damage by standing on my toes to see in the wall-mounted mirror.

In the day I'd been aboard the wound had edged itself completely shut, scar-tissue transforming into skin as thin as paper. I pressed at it gently with my fingers, pulled them hurriedly away. It may have looked good on the surface, but underneath I could feel it had a long way to go. It still stung, still ached, but the stick was no longer poking into me. The cold sweats had vanished completely during the night, and I had the distinct impression of new blood flowing through my veins.

I showered, washed away the last of the blood that had scabbed to my body and stood dripping as I stared at my face in the mirror. Stubble had sprouted blond along my jaw. Faster, I thought, than it usually does. I looked dishevelled but well, and I cast my own superstitious glance at the walls, the same expression on my face as Maji had had the day before. Maybe, whatever it was, it _was_ in the walls.

There was no shaving gear to be seen, nothing beyond the soap and the water and a small heap of unfolded towels. I wrapped one of them around my waist and returned to my quarters. Maybe I would find something useful there. I pulled out the drawers of the bureau. Empty. Swept completely clean. I opened the tiny closet, surprised to find a sweater and two pair of combat trousers piled untidily on the upper shelf. I took the sweater and pulled it over my head and slid into a pair of the trousers. Too tight around the waist, but they were cleaner than my own and they would do until I found myself something else. My eye caught on a shadow heaped in a corner of the closet… a jacket that looked like it had fallen from its hanger.

I reached down and lifted it out, my thumb playing over a brass button. It was a uniform, a relic from a hundred years and a thousand star-systems away, history flowing cool beneath my fingertips. A Gaia insignia was riveted to the breast. A name stamped on the inside collar. _Takagi,_ it said. I returned it to its hanger, smoothed the fabric down with my fingers, stood in my borrowed clothes in front of the open closet with my eye on that uniform. If what Yattaran had said was true, Harlock must have worn a uniform like that. More than a lifetime ago.

I settled on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of the bedside table – empty – and slid it silently shut. I wrestled my feet back into my boots, an object beneath the bed catching my eye as I leaned down to the fastenings. I scraped it out with a toe. A photograph. A picture of a man, a woman and a baby, framed in sunshine yellow. Takagi, I supposed. I wondered if he minded that I was sleeping in his bed. If he minded that I was wearing his pants.

I slid the drawer open again, placed the photograph face-down inside it.


	2. Part 2

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part two)**

* * *

A dull thud echoed through the ship, the vibration waking me and pulling me out of my sleep.

I lay a moment, listening, wondering if I'd imagined it. You know those dreams you have, those sudden loud noises that jolt you from your sleep.

There was another thud, followed by the muffled sound of _Arcadia_ returning fire.

I glanced at the chronometer. Still two hours till my watch, and we had plenty of crew aboard, more than enough to handle the kinds of skirmishes _Arcadia_ was increasingly coming up against. We'd spent three years in the territories, skirting the outer ring of the galaxy as we collected men and planted oscillators, and now we were making our way around the spiral on a steady inward curve. The problem was this brought us closer to civilisation. Closer to the Gaia colonies, where the sight of _Arcadia_ on an incoming vector was enough to mobilise even the most pathetic of planetary defences.

I rolled over, bunched the pillow over my head and tried to ignore the irregular thud of gunfire against the hull. That was easy. Ignoring my newly-woken bladder, however, was impossible.

I heaved myself out of bed, staggered on still-sleeping legs out into the corridor and made my way to the head. As I leaned over the urinal, one steadying hand against the wall and the other on little Ari and thinking the poor neglected bastard hadn't been getting out much lately, there was another thud against the hull, bigger and harder than anything any colony defences were capable of. I paused, listening. There was an almighty crack and _Arcadia_ canted sideways, sent me crashing hard against the wall.

The klaxon sounded. A steady _whoop-whoop-whoop_ that called all hands to stations.

* * *

'Take over!' Yattaran barked as I skidded onto the upper command. Another hit slammed into _Arcadia's_ flank, lurching me into the console adjacent the first mate.

I hustled Dan out of the station and sent him forward to the artillery, where he'd be of more use. 'What is it?' I called across to Yattaran.

'Coalition, destroyer class.' He lurched at his post as another burst of cannon fire slammed into us, this time targeting the forward quarter.

The bridge tipped sideways, my fingers clamping around the edges of the console as I fought to stay upright. 'And you didn't see it coming?'

'We saw it coming,' he retorted, 'but by then it was too – '

'Concentrate forward fire,' Harlock shouted from his position at the wheel.

'Concentrate forward fire!' Yattaran barked down at the weapons command, a chorus of 'ayes!' sounding from the lower deck.

The Coalition ship overshot the bow, listing slightly as a burst from our forward turrets caught the hull midway. A plume of fire and escaping air erupted from the rent in her side as I turned my attention back to the console.

'Enemy status,' I reported, my voice pitched loud enough for the captain to hear. 'Port guns destroyed. Forward cannon destroyed. Life support sixty percent.'

Harlock half-turned his head. 'Engines?'

'No damage.' I studied the uplink readout. I was receiving an ident ping as the stricken ship sent out an urgent request for help and I sent out a squeal to stop it in its tracks. 'Idents as Heavy Cruiser _Argus._ Sending a distress call.'

'Jam it,' Harlock said.

'Done.'

Harlock turned back to the wheel and spun it violently to starboard. He had an oscillator to deploy and he wasn't letting a little thing like a Coalition cruiser get in his way. 'Target the engines.'

'You heard Captain,' Yattaran bellowed. 'Take out those damn engines!'

Another chorus of 'ayes' rose from the weapons command as _Arcadia_ came about and we found ourselves staring down into the glowing core of _Argus'_ thruster banks.

'All batteries,' Harlock ordered, even though the cannon were already swivelling in their mounts and aiming into _Argus'_ engine core.

'Fire!'

The blast from _Arcadia's_ artillery thudded dully through the ship. Multiple columns of orange shot from the cannon into _Argus_ , the reaction of dark matter energy meeting standard matter drive so unexpectedly blinding we had to turn our heads to look away. When the blast faded we saw the entire rear section of _Argus_ was gone. A steady stream of debris leaked from what was left, burned and blasted metal mingled with the broken and twisted bodies of men, the innards of a mighty behemoth spewing fitfully from the open wound as _Argus_ listed in an uncontrolled dive towards the planet.

 _Shit._ The Coalition would definitely be paying attention now.

Harlock's hands fell from the wheel. He stood for a moment, staring down at the crew on the lower deck. And then he turned and strode back to my station. 'Aristotle. With me.'

'Aye sir.' I locked down the console, shot a glance at Yattaran and followed in the captain's wake to the flight deck.

* * *

There was no need for environmental suits on Turas. It had been terraformed decades ago, and this time we were lucky – the node was right out on the surface. There was no visible indication of it, the only sign of its existence being a slight twist on the magnetometer as we came in on approach. Not enough deviation to provoke interest on a routine planetary survey, and I wondered how Harlock even knew it was there.

He seemed unconcerned as he piloted the deployment module down to the surface, the burning hulk of _Argus_ flickering like a candle flame in the sky behind us, a mass of debris that would soon come crashing to ground. I sat beside him in the co-pilot's chair, toggling through the sensors and the comms, eavesdropping on Turas' meagre planetary communications systems, alert for any chatter about _Argus_ and looking for any sign of Coalition presence either on the planet or off.

Nothing.

'Weird,' I said aloud, and when Harlock didn't answer I said, 'no subspace chatter, no high-frequency bursts. Nothing on the planetary grid. It's like _Argus_ didn't exist.'

There was a jolt against the hull as we slipped through the jet stream, a buffeting that made me lean back in the chair and clamp a hand reflexively around the restraints. 'Think about it,' I said as we juddered through a layer of unstable air and I swallowed down the queasiness that was rising in my gut. _'_ She got at least five seconds of subspace out before I jammed her. Somebody somewhere must have intercepted that transmission.'

Harlock stared out of the forward port, his attention focussed on his flying. Not that he needed to concentrate. He was the best pilot I'd ever seen, in space or in atmosphere. At one with the machine and all that.

He angled the module on a slight turn and I glanced up from what I was doing to look out at the world. We were flying parallel to the ground now, the flat, featureless terrain of Turas slipping by in a big brown blur.

' _Argus_ came out of nowhere,' I said, trying to draw out what he was thinking. 'Like she was waiting for us.' I looked sideways at him, saw his lips tighten.

The module dipped suddenly down towards the ground.

* * *

I keyed open the hatch, scooped up the deployment case and clambered down the ladder to the oscillator proper.

Deploying an oscillator was routine now: fire the anchor cables, power up the core, set the detonator to standby, enter the command code and lock it all down. I could do it with my eyes closed, and I might have tried it if Harlock hadn't slid down the ladder behind me. He cruised aimlessly around the deck, his boots tapping loud against the metal as he surveyed the barren landscape that surrounded us – rock and dirt, flat brown plains ending in a low rise of mountains a hundred clicks away, pale sky streaked with wisps of moisture that were trying very hard to be clouds. The footfalls ceased as he leaned his elbows against the rails and stared into the hazy distance.

'There was a town back there,' he said.

My shoulders slumped. 'I saw.' I closed the case and engaged the lock. _'Argus_ sent out a distress call,' I said, knowing how much it annoyed him to be reminded of the obvious. 'In an hour, or a minute, reinforcements could be here.'

I looked at him where he leant at the rail. He was wearing one of his older flight suits. The one with the blaster burn across the shoulder. 'And we'll be trapped,' I continued, staring at his back. 'Down here.'

He nodded, without turning around. 'Tell Yattaran we'll be late.'

* * *

It was a bar like any of the others that Harlock had dragged one or another of us to over the years. Although, probably, possibly, maybe, this particular specimen was the worst.

A swinging door creaked inward from the dusty street, a single step up leading to a dingy room, a rough-hewn floor dotted with stained and wobbling tables at which sat the saddest representatives of the progeny of Gaia I had seen so far. They seemed worse even than those on Heavy Meldar, and as I surveyed the dim interior I reassessed my conviction that Meldar was the arse-end of the universe. Quite possibly Turas now took out first prize as the puckered anus of the galaxy.

I paused in the doorway, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light and my nose to adjust to the stench of stale vomit that thickened the air. I could see bullet holes tracking across the adobe walls, several of them smeared with what looked like poorly-scrubbed bloodstains. 'Bullets,' I muttered, nodding at the walls. 'They're still using bullets.'

Harlock moved in close behind me and touched a hand to my arm, a spark of dark matter stinging into me like static. I no longer jumped when he brushed against me – I'd been on _Arcadia_ for long enough that I was making my own sparks by now, and when I took my clothes off in the dark I could sometimes see them faintly on my skin, tiny lightnings made of lilac.

'Because you can make bullets at home,' he said, steering me towards the bar. He prodded me towards a stool at the counter and raised a hand for the barkeep. 'They're cheap and easy and they'll still do the job.'

'As long as I'm not the job,' I groused, turning to survey the specimens sitting at the tables, their hard and weathered faces looking curiously at us. I gave them my best death-stare, satisfied only when the searching gazes dropped one by one to focus back on their drinks. Only then did I turn and hunch myself over the counter, the grained surface water-worn and splintering beneath my un-gloved fingers. I sighed, imagining the alcoholic delights that were about to blast the surface of my tongue. 'Delight,' of course, being an entirely subjective sentiment.

Harlock seemed inexplicably drawn to these dives, to the seediest shitholes of humanity. In the early days I thought it was the booze that brought him. But watching him I realised it was humanity itself, reaching out and drawing him in. Not that he loved humanity – the fact was he despised it. But it helped with his resolve, I think, to see how low humanity could go. To inventory all the reasons why the universe needed to do it over.

Then again, maybe it was just the booze. Something different to the red wine he soaked himself in night after night after night.

Harlock let me do the ordering, and three shots of the local firewater later had me definitely feeling the burn. I sculled down a fourth and slammed the empty glass back onto the bar. 'That shit is poison,' I croaked, choking on it. 'I think it's killed me.'

Harlock snorted at my discomfort and downed a mouthful of liquor in one smooth, unhurried swallow. 'Girl,' he said, chinking a tiny window open and letting me in.

'Bastard,' I said through the chink. He laughed, the liquor softening him, smoothing out his hard and impenetrable edges.

An unopened bottle of Twelve Worlds sat between us at the bar. He'd suggested it, I'd ordered it, and we'd paid for it together, scraping out what currency we could find in the combined bottoms of our pockets. It was a gift, for Miimé, and it would hopefully buy the both of us favours. Although I had no doubt Harlock's favours were far more interesting than my own.

The door swung open on its creaking hinges and a kid, not more than nineteen or twenty, teetered uncertainly through. He sat down at the table nearest the door, the entire bar turning to look at him as he fell heavily into the chair, and then turning away again. Except for Harlock. He remained turned on his stool, looking past me at the new arrival.

I'd glanced at the kid myself when he'd come in, but now I swivelled to look again, trying to see what was holding Harlock's attention. As I watched the bartender came out from behind the bar and took the kid's order, returned to the table a moment later with a half-glass of pale liquid. The kid nodded his thanks, reached a grimy hand into a pocket and handed over a few credits. The bartender clinked them in his hand contemplatively, then turned and walked away.

The kid didn't touch the drink. Just stared at it. His face and his body were covered in a light layer of dust, one arm and one cheek splattered with somebody else's blood that he had unsuccessfully tried to wipe away. He was wearing wind goggles, and these he now slid up onto his head to settle in a nest of thick hair. Clear of the goggles his eyes were blue and bright, and as I watched they filled with sudden tears.

I turned away, not sure what embarrassed me most – the kid's tears, or Harlock's relentless stare. Whatever, I was stuck in the middle. I shifted on the stool and positioned myself deliberately between Harlock and the kid, gave the captain the side of my head to stare at.

There was an exhalation from Harlock, a soft 'fff' that might have been a laugh. He lifted his glass to his lips and drained the last of the liquor. 'Aristotle,' he said indulgently.

'Ari,' I reminded, taking advantage of his mood.

He snorted, clinking the empty glass back onto the bar and slipping from the stool. 'You should know better by now.' He brushed past me, pulled out a chair at the kid's table and slid smoothly into it.

I turned away and concentrated on my empty glass. And then I laughed, imagining the expression on Yattaran's face when Harlock came back with another of his stray dogs.

* * *

When shit happens, it tends to happen all at once.

My personal comms started jangling in my pocket. I fumbled tingling fingers – the hooch had definitely damaged my nervous system – into my pocket, scooped out the communicator and activated the receiver. Yattaran's voice sounded from the tiny speaker.

'Ari, you've got a Coalition light cruiser on your hands. Just in-skipped onto your side of the planet.'

 _Shit._ I swivelled on the stool to look at Harlock. 'Company,' I said to him, and then into the comms, _'Arcadia?'_

'Polar orbit as per Captain's orders. Recommend you move both your butts and get back here before they get a fix on our location. Or _your_ location.'

'Butts are on the move.' I was already off the stool and attempting to stuff the flat bottle of Twelve Worlds into my pants pocket. Didn't work, so I shoved it down the front of my pants instead.

Harlock was also on his feet and already at the door. He cracked it open enough to peer both directions down the street, closed it and turned around. 'Local enforcements,' he said, glancing at the kid still sitting bewildered at the table. He indicated with a nod that the kid was coming with us. Like I didn't know that already.

'C'mon, kid.' I strode across to the table, slid a hand roughly beneath his armpit and hoisted him into standing. His drink still sat untouched on the table. 'You're gonna wish you'd swallowed that in a minute.' I yanked him towards the door. 'What's your name, kid?'

'E – Eddie,' he stammered out as he was hustled towards the door, my hand still tight beneath his arm.

'Eddie. Stick close, do everything I say, and don't fuck it up.'

He licked his lips, his dust-smeared face now dotted with sweat, and nodded his head. His flesh was sparse beneath my fingers, but there was muscle there, the stringy kind of muscle you find on a chicken.

'How many?' I asked Harlock over the top of Eddie's head.

'Four,' Harlock said.

'Plan?'

'We're walking out.' He cracked the door open and took another look.

'Great plan.'

'They won't know what they're looking for,' he said, widening the chink in the door to let me out. 'Not yet.'

I slid my hand from beneath Eddie's arm and wrapped it affectionately around his shoulder. 'C'mon kid, you and me are gonna be friends.'

I shoved him tottering past Harlock, out through the door and stumbling into the street. What passed for the local militia had congregated about three shopfronts down. Four of them, as Harlock had said, armed and armoured but milling aimlessly. I noted the dusty armour only covered the important bits – chest, groin and thighs – and their guns were still holstered. No doubt they'd been mobilised by Gaia Command after _Argus_ had crashed to ground, but without further instruction they had no idea what, or who, they were looking for.

As Eddie and I spilled into the street they turned to look at us, so I hoisted the kid straighter on his feet, clapped a broad hand against his scrawny arse and squeezed. 'Come on boy,' I said to him, loud enough for the militia to hear. 'You said you were gonna show me a good time.'

Eddie flinched beneath my grip and attempted to skitter away. 'Kid,' I whispered, pulling him back against me and pressing my lips close to his ear. 'You gotta make this look good.' I rubbed my groin against him. 'That aint no happy time you're feeling down there.' It wasn't a gun, either, it was only Miimé's bottle of Twelve Worlds, but Eddie didn't know that and it had the desired effect. 'Play along or we're all dead.'

He relaxed slightly, giving in to fate, I guess, and the dried blood on his face indicated that so far today fate hadn't been showing him a great time. I felt a bit sorry for him, so I lifted my hand from his arse and slid it back around his shoulders, glancing up to see the militia still staring. I gave them what I hoped was a wolfish grin and squeezed Eddie tighter. 'Hand's off fellas,' I called up the street, laughing as they turned away. 'He's all mine.'

Behind us Harlock had seen his opportunity, had slipped out onto the street and was walking casually away from the action in the opposite direction. I spun Eddie around and followed, my arm still tight around him and making sure to keep us between Harlock and the militia's line of sight. I doubted they would give us a second glance, but I kept an affectionate grip on Eddie, just in case.

A narrow alleyway appeared ahead and Harlock disappeared down it. I followed leisurely, ushering the reluctant Eddie around the corner, and when I was sure we could no longer be seen, I let him go.

'Now what,' I said to Harlock.

'We double back to the module.'

Easier said than done. 'Yattaran reported a light cruiser in orbit. What if the Coalition get to the module before we do?'

'Bad luck for them,' he said, with a glint in his eye.

* * *

The Coalition ground forces had excellent luck that day. According to _Arcadia's_ scanners they hadn't yet got a deployment to the planet, and it was a relief to find the module in the deserted canyon where we'd left her, standing upright on her three engines and still entirely alone.

Eddie was puffing from the jog we'd hustled him into, and the layer of dust I had noted on him in the bar was even thicker after the final dash along the canyon floor. Harlock and I were equally dusty, the thickest layer being from the soles of our boots on up to our thighs with a light dusting over just about everything else. I could feel it powdered in my hair, sticking to the sweat on my face and sucking the moisture out of my eyes and my mouth.

Ahead of us Harlock had already reached the module, long legs effortlessly outpacing our efforts. Times like these he made me feel the same way Miimé made me feel – clumsy and heavy and all too human. I glanced up to see him moving lightly up the ladder towards the hatch, as though there was no gravity pressing down on him at all. But me, I could definitely feel it, the heavy atmosphere of Turas pressing me hard to the planet and squeezing the air puffing out of my lungs. I slowed my pace as Eddie caught up, let him overtake me and shoved a hand into his back as he did, angling him towards the ladder. 'Quick,' I said, because _Arcadia_ was on her way and it was only a matter of time before the Coalition got a bead on her.

But instead of moving up the ladder Eddie stopped, both hands tight on the rungs and both legs still on solid ground. 'I can't,' he said.

'Shit kid, just _move!'_

The hands dropped from the rungs and he turned his dust-streaked face to look at me. 'I'm not going.' He shook his head, took two steps away from the module to let me pass.

I stared at him dumbly, wondering what the hell Harlock had said to get him this far, and what the hell I could say to get him the rest of the way up that ladder.

'Listen, kid,' I clamped my fingers around his arm and pushed him against the ladder, willing him to climb it. 'Eddie,' I amended, trying to be nice. Probably too late, given how hard my fingers were chewing into his flesh. 'Listen, whatever he promised you, he meant it. You want outta this hole?' I was still pushing at him. 'This is it, this is your ticket out. Your big chance to do something with your life.'

I butted him futilely against the ladder, body limp, arms hanging at his sides. As I glared at him his eyes brightened with tears that threatened to spill over. He sniffed and I panicked. _Ah, hell no, not the tears again._

I glanced up at the cockpit. Where the hell was Harlock? Did he have any fucking idea what I was going through with his latest acquisition?

As if on cue the intakes slammed open, a high-pitched whine commencing deep inside the engines as Harlock initiated the ignition sequence, heightening my sense of urgency.

'Listen,' I said, 'Eddie. In one minute the captain is going to ignite those engines and if we're still standing here when that happens the blast is gonna roast the meat right off our bones. You're either going to climb into that cockpit willingly or I will haul you up by your scrawny neck.' _And if you insist on standing here snivelling I will break your fucking neck and leave your fucking chickenshit remains for whatever fucking vermin crawls across this fucking shithole planet,_ I added mentally, my hand scrunching into the back of his vest and heaving him bodily up the first three rungs of the ladder.

Eddie must have seen the neck-breaking in my eyes, or heard it in my voice, or maybe felt it in the fist bunched at the back of his neck, because next thing he was hanging voluntarily from the ladder and I wasn't far behind him, rushing him with my urgency and his dirty skinny legs getting in my way. _Move,_ I willed him, but he was already moving. Awkward, but moving.

Harlock glanced at us as we spilled into the cockpit, impatience all over his face.

'Second thoughts,' I growled, shunting Eddie towards the jumpseat and pointing at the restraints. I slid into the co-pilot's seat as the hatch locked into place and the engines ignited. 'I really thought you were about to toast us.'

'You may still get toasted,' Harlock said. 'The cruiser has locked onto _Arcadia_. We may have trouble getting back.'

I looked at him sharply, my mouth falling open. 'You're not seriously going to try.'

'Aristotle,' he said, in the patient, fatherly tone that he pulled out in those moments when you thought you were about to die. 'We could stay here and fight it out, two of us against a Coalition ground force. And we could pray that we get killed and not captured. Or we can run for it and hope we make it to _Arcadia_ before their fighters are mobilised.' He relinquished the console in a gesture of surrender and turned to look at me. 'To coin a phrase… what will it be, Aristotle? Fight or flight?'

'Fuck that,' I said, buckling myself into the harness. 'Flight.'

He turned, hands back on the console, a smile crooking the corner of his mouth. The deployment module wasn't designed for combat. It had no weaponry, the most basic of shielding, and the three engine ports were definitely not designed for speed or high manoeuvrability. If this was going to work we were dependent on Harlock's skill as a pilot, and if anybody could get this bucket through a Coalition cordon, it was the captain.

I turned to Eddie as the module lifted off. 'This is going to get hairy, kid, so hold on tight.'

He stared wide-eyed at me, adam's apple bobbing as he gulped down his fear. I suddenly regretted shoving him up the ladder, hoping I hadn't shoved him to his death.


	3. Part 3

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part three)**

* * *

Ships are like women, or so the saying goes. Treat them nice, stroke them in the right places, bolster their egos with kind and gentle words and they'll do just about anything for you.

Like I said, it's a saying, and it isn't mine. But it's an idea that seems to work for Harlock, since more than one member of the crew has caught him talking to _Arcadia_ over the years. Moments of quiet when he thought no-one was looking, or listening, and spending whole nights alone in the central computer room, talking to nobody. And not a few of us pausing as we passed by the door, to listen, and to look at each other with questions in our eyes.

Harlock wasn't talking now. His mouth was set in a line of grim determination as he sent the deployment module screaming towards breakaway velocity. The module hadn't been designed for this kind of treatment, but she offered barely a squeak of protest at the affront – the rattling of the console the only indication she was being pushed beyond her normal parameters. But that was nothing compared to the rattling of my teeth as we pushed through seventeen kilometres of atmosphere. It was a relief when the air thinned and gravity loosed its grip and we shot from the pale sky of Turas and out into the comforting black weightlessness of space.

And into the welcoming arms of the Coalition.

'What the fuck?' I strained against the harness so I could peer out through the viewport. 'Where the hell did they come from?'

A squadron of Coalition short-range fighters dispersed at high-speed across our forward view and scattered around us like dogs circling around a rabbit. I squinted against the glare of the sun – a K-class that shouldn't even have a viable planet around it – and turned my head, my eyes following their trajectory as they shot around and then behind us.

Harlock dipped the module sharply and rolled her over one-eighty so that we turned abruptly away from the sun and Turas completely filled the forward view with her big brown glare.

'Readings,' he snapped as he spun us back around to see the stars.

My fingers pounded against the scanners. The cruiser was parked thirteen thousand away, but the fighter contingent was reforming right on top of us.

This was not how today was meant to go.

Shit. Shit shit _shit._

'Count five,' I said. 'Standard contingent.' As I spoke the fighters passed over us in delta formation, split up decoratively and doubled back again in our direction. 'What game are they playing,' I grunted as Harlock jerked the module down and left, snapping my head sideways with the momentum. 'Why don't they start shooting already?'

'It's not the module they're after _,'_ he said, his eye on the fighters reforming ahead of us. 'They know we're not out here alone.'

'What's their plan? They cat-and-mouse us 'til _Arcadia_ arrives?'

Harlock pulled back on the stick and sent us hurtling upwards, away from our pursuers and away from the planet. My head smacked against the back of the seat and I left it there, gritting my teeth as we spun completely around on our axis. He looked across at me as the module briefly righted.

'You're not going to throw up, are you?'

'Not yet,' I grunted through lips tight against a clenched jaw. An expression of doubt crossed his face, and I shook my head _no_ – a short, sharp shake designed not to upset my equilibrium any more than it already was. He turned back to his flying, pointedly shifting his feet out of the splatter zone. I glanced back at Eddie, white-faced in the jump seat. He looked a lot closer to throwing up than I did.

A torpedo hit our rear flank, not enough to hole us, but enough to knock us sideways. It was a love tap. An unsubtle warning.

'Not so cat and mouse,' Harlock muttered as a second shot landed on our nose and the impact spread in blue lightning across our shields.

'Shit. They're using damned torpedoes. We won't last five minutes if they decide to get serious. Where the hell's _Arcadia?'_ I fanned the sensors out but couldn't get a signal. She was still cloaked in dark matter, in-skipping through from the other side of the planet. 'This wouldn't be happening if – '

'Aristotle,' Harlock warned.

I closed my mouth. Shut my eyes against another explosion of light across our forward shields. _Arcadia_ didn't have her own fighter contingent, though some of the men had been arguing for one – Baptiste in particular. He was a pilot, an ex-Targan Ranger who'd fought the Coalition at the Battle of Carina and somehow survived the rout. He was always angling for fighter cover, and said he knew where the Coalition stored a fleet of Cosmowings that were sitting around gathering dust. But Harlock never seemed enthused. Self-repairing and with cannon that out-classed and out-distanced anything the Coalition had, _Arcadia_ was as un-killable as her captain.

But I wasn't un-killable. At least not yet. And the deployment module was hideously vulnerable. A red light blinked on the console – the forward shields were down forty-five percent. Another burst on our nose and we would find ourselves eating vacuum.

'Shields are dropping,' I told him. 'We need to land this bucket.'

As I spoke the fighters split up again, dived around the module and vanished into the void behind us. I strained forward to look out the viewport, almost breaking my neck as I tried to see where they had disappeared to.

' _Arcadia,'_ Harlock announced.

'What?'

I was still leaning forward, straining against the seat harness as I scanned space for a visual on the fighters. And then I saw it – a roiling cloud that formed itself at the thinnest edge of the planet's atmosphere. A billow of black that expanded and contracted, boiling in upon itself as it disgorged _Arcadia_ in flashes of blood-red lightning. A kilometre of bristling battleship appeared out of darkness, her prow a grinning death's head with eyes burning like the glowing pits of hell.

I stared at the apparition – because that's what she was – wondering how the hell Harlock had known she was here. I glanced across at him, watched a grin crook the corner of his mouth as _Arcadia_ passed at speed across our bow, dark matter trailing in plumes from her hull as her gun turrets turned in their mounts and tracked the Coalition squadron.

A fighter passed between us and I didn't need my scanners to know he had a lock on us – the cat had arrived, so the mouse had to go.

'Brace,' I managed to get out, when without warning _Arcadia's_ guns erupted in our direction, burning my retinas with blinding streamers of red.

'What gives?' I said as the fighter disintegrated in front of us and peppered the module with high-speed debris. 'Those morons nearly fried us!'

Harlock said nothing, his attention focussed on righting the module and realigning us on course towards _Arcadia._ We were buffeted in the debris field for about three seconds, but it was enough for second fighter to get a lock on us. A torpedo slammed point-blank into the rear quarter, ripped a hole through our shields and knocked off us course.

'Engine one is down.' I scrambled to divert power to the rear shields and cut the engine before it had a chance to flame out.

Harlock cursed as he struggled to bring us level and power out of range as the fighter surfaced from beneath us, came around and locked his guns on the cockpit.

Another round of fire exploded from _Arcadia_ and sliced right across our nose, hot and bright and blinding and impacting the Coalition fighter with pinpoint accuracy – and almost taking a layer of our hull with it.

' _Arcadia,'_ I barked into the comms. 'Who's on that gun?' Because no matter how good they were, when I found the bastard I was going to kill him.

There was dead air, and then Maji responded. 'Nobody.'

Now it was my turn to give dead air. I looked at the captain, said more to myself than to anybody within hearing distance 'what the fuck does he mean 'nobody'?' and was immediately hurled straining into the seat harness as Harlock sent the module into another spin. Another burst of fire exploded from _Arcadia,_ passed metres from our port and lit the cockpit up with orange. I turned my head to follow its tangent through the viewport, watched as the beam sliced a third fighter neatly in two, the pilot spinning flailing out into space. I leaned back in to the comms.

' _Arcadia,_ repeat. Who the hell is on those guns?'

'Nobody!' Maji's voice again. In the background I could hear Yattaran screaming orders, probably as horrified as I was at _Arcadia's_ inexplicable turn of independence.

'Then get a body on those weapons and stop aiming them at us!'

'Leave it,' Harlock countermanded.

'What?'

'I said leave it!' He sent the ship into another dive as another fighter shot across our bow.

'In case you hadn't noticed,' I ground out as I was slammed back into my seat, 'your ship is shooting at you.'

He pulled the module back, ducked around a pepper of Coalition fire. _'Arcadia_ knows what she's doing.'

'You know how crazy that sounds?'

He ignored me. I opened the comms again. 'Captain says belay that order.'

' _What?'_ This was Yattaran. 'But Captain – '

' _He says leave it!'_ And then I repeated Harlock's words, but much less convincingly. _'Arcadia_ knows what she's doing.'

'What? Do you know – '

I cut the comms before Yattaran could hurl a stream of ear-burning invectives at me. Last thing I wanted was to die with him screaming in my ear. 'I hope to hell _you_ know what you're doing,' I muttered at the captain.

'Me too,' he murmured, making me do a double-take to look at him.

'Hold on,' he said, sending the module into a power dive back towards the planet.

I didn't know how Eddie was handling it and I couldn't turn around to look. It was all I could do to keep my intestines where they belonged and not up in my throat where they kept trying to crawl. The Gs were extreme, the hard turns playing havoc with my equilibrium and curdling the hooch in my stomach. I was a landlubber through and through, and this was the worst kind of flying for a man born with both feet on the ground. If I got out of this without vomiting I would count it as a good day. Getting out of it alive would just be the bonus.

The module skimmed through the pale edge of the atmosphere, flames igniting across its skin and flaring on the shielding of the viewport. The shields crackled randomly, lightning sparking at the points where it had been breached.

The two remaining fighters followed, forcing Harlock to swerve the module left, and then right, all the while taking us down to where the drag of the atmosphere would make the fighters turn back. He was evening the odds, but the further down we went the further we moved from the safety of _Arcadia's_ guns. At this point I no longer cared who was – or wasn't – manning them. I just wanted those fighters off our tail.

As if on cue a multiple burst of orange arced through the thin layer of air, targeted the trailing fighter with unerring accuracy and exploded it into spinning arcs of flame. Caught by atmosphere the debris spiralled planetward, a shower of fire that burned bright for a moment before sputtering into flowers of drifting black smoke.

There was only one fighter left, and at this point the pilot was taking matters into his own hands. Vengeance is a potent force, and seeing four of your comrades go up in flames is a mighty powerful motivator. And this pilot was stubborn – he knew the risks of atmosphere, but he had a bead on our tail and he just wasn't letting go.

'Captain,' Maji hailed – Yattaran was probably still too busy cussing. 'The cruiser has mobilised and will be in firing range in under ten. Requesting orders.'

'Cripple it,' Harlock replied tonelessly.

'What about you?'

'Under control.'

'What?' I squeaked. The console was blinking like a christmas tree as more and more power drained from the shields. They could collapse at any moment, and then it would be us out there, spinning flailing out into space and with the planet rushing up to meet us.

The air was thicker now and manoeuvring on the remaining engines was getting steadily harder. I could feel the drag against the hull, could see Harlock straining as he fought against the increasingly dense atmosphere. Only a couple more kilometres and the excess oxygen in the air would flood the fighter's engines and ignite whatever fuel he had left. By the time the pilot realised what was happening it would be too late – he'd be on an irreversible countdown to total ignition. All Harlock had to do was keep the module in one piece until – there. It was over in an instant. A blinding flash filled the sky as the fighter's load of fuel ignited all at once.

There was silence in the module, a brief respite as Harlock braked the engines back to more sedate operating levels and set course back to _Arcadia_. Behind us I could hear Eddie breathing, loudly, through his mouth.

'A hundred years,' Harlock said, breaking the silence _,_ 'and they still make the same stupid mistakes.'

* * *

We waited in the module as Harlock shut down the systems and the atmosphere cycled back into _Arcadia's_ hangar. I swallowed against the lingering nausea and said, 'the Ranger might be right. Maybe we do need some fighters.'

'Mm,' Harlock said, the sound so non-committal I couldn't tell if he was agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. 'You're still alive, aren't you?'

Okay. Disagreeing with me.

'Thanks to you,' I said. 'And _Arcadia._ And whoever it was that was doing all the shooting.'

He turned to look at me, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it and settled his lips into a straight, implacable line. But his gaze remained locked on mine, his expression hesitant. Uncertain. His lips tightened and he abruptly turned away.

I exhaled loudly, unaware I'd been holding my breath. 'What if it was somebody else at that console,' I continued from where I'd left off. 'Me, for example.'

His fingers slowed in their movement, finally came to a stop as the systems closed down. 'Alright,' he said without looking up. 'Talk to Baptiste. Find out where the Coalition is keeping those Cosmowings.'

'Aye, sir.' I struggled to keep the satisfaction from my face. Harlock might not be looking at me, but he had an uncanny knack for knowing what a person was thinking, and when a stupid expression was passing across that person's face.

Movement outside the cockpit caught my eye and I looked up to see the hangar door sliding open, the pressure seal disengaging in a silent puff of dust. 'Here's the homecoming party,' I said as Yattaran and Maji entered the hangar. Yattaran sauntered across the deck nonchalantly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day, but Maji stopped midstride and stared aghast at the module. I could only imagine the dents and burns she must have sported – repairs for Maji and his crew to do, not to mention the injury to Maji's pride, and to the equipment that the engineer so lovingly tended.

I stood and moved across to Eddie on shaky legs. I was still queasy, and still having trouble not throwing up. 'You okay, kid?' I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as I could. As though this kind of shit happened every day.

He was still breathing through his mouth, lips slack, his face pale as he looked up at me with watering eyes. One hand fumbled blindly at the harness restraints.

'Here,' I said, moving in and releasing the catch with a thumb.

'Thanks,' he mumbled as he leaned free of the seat restraints and vomited quietly onto my feet.

'Ah, crap. You're cleaning that up,' I snarled, a little meaner than I needed to as I goosestepped back from the gelatinous chunks that cascaded onto my boots. What the hell had this kid been eating?

And then the smell hit, the acid tang overriding any semblance of control I might have had over my own stomach. _Shit._ I clamped my jaw down tight and rushed towards the hatch, slid awkwardly down the ladder to where Yattaran waited on the deck, collapsed to my knees and promptly threw up.

'Ahhh…' Yattaran said, eyeing me with disgust. 'You're cleaning that up.'

I wiped the spittle from my lips and surveyed the puddle of regurgitated liquor as it spread across the floor and crept slowly towards my knees. 'Ergh,' I said to nobody in particular, my stomach tightening and threatening to expel whatever else might have been left.

Yattaran stepped back from the spreading puddle. 'What the hell did you get up to down there?' he continued in his fish-wife drawl, happy now he had something new to complain about. 'Captain,' he called towards the module. 'What upset the philosopher's stomach this time?'

Harlock's feet sounded on the deck behind me. He skirted around the vomit, placing a comforting hand on the top of my head as he passed. 'Same old problem,' he said as his hand fell away.

'Ah,' Yattaran said, nodding sagely. 'The drink.'

'No,' I croaked towards Harlock's retreating back. 'The flying.'

Harlock stopped mid-stride. I watched his boots turn on the deck with military precision, walk back in my direction and come to a stop on the opposite side of the puddle.

'Yattaran,' he said over the top of my head. 'There's a new recruit on the module. Find somebody…patient…to look after him. He's…' I watched as his feet shifted on the deck, '… had a bad day.'

'Are you saying I'm not patient?' Yattaran exploded, and if I wasn't digging my lunch out of my teeth with my tongue I might have laughed. But also I had the captain looming over me, probably pissed that I'd just shit all over his driving.

Harlock's gloved hand appeared before my eyes, palm up, fingers twitching with impatience.

I sat back on my heels, reached down the front of my pants and extracted the bottle of Twelve Worlds. Slapped it into the palm of his hand.

* * *

My boots were wet. Damp with water and the faded stains of Eddie's puke. They creaked as I walked, the noise loud in the dark and quiet corridors.

I'd left Eddie in the care of Yattaran, who'd left him in the care of Vincent, who'd left him in the care of Carlos, who would probably leave him in the care of the next dumb sucker that came along. I snorted to myself in the dim silence. The kid didn't have a hope in hell.

Pale light spilled from an opening ahead of me, along with the tang of dark matter and the indistinct murmur of voices. The door to the central computer room was open – something that had been happening more and more often of late.

I tread gently, tried to muffle the damp squeak of leather on leather as I neared the open door. Harlock's voice flowed out with the light, his words soft and disjointed, as though I was hearing only one half of a conversation. I turned my head, listening, slowed my steps and tried to peer in.

'Aristotle.'

 _Shit._

Miimé. She'd come out of nowhere, crept up on me in that noiseless way she had, as though she walked with her feet floating an inch above the ground. She stepped in front of me and moved in close, the scent of her skin overlaid with the tang of hard liquor.

'Thank you,' she said. She lifted a pale arm, fingers clamped tight around the neck of the Twelve Worlds. A third of the contents were gone already. 'Harlock told me where…' Her free hand gestured towards my groin and she smiled. It might even have been a laugh.

'Uh...' I stared into her eyes, mesmerised by the cat-green of the irises, the pupils widening as she moved closer to me. Her breath was cool and electric on my face, and I felt exposed beneath her gaze, defenceless as her hand hovered close. So, _so_ close.

I swallowed, my adam's apple scraping hard against the neck of my sweater. ''It was, ah… Captain's idea,' I managed to rasp out, the breath bleeding out of me as I stepped reluctantly away from her approaching hand. Watched it fall languidly back to her side.

She smiled, a secret smile, and I felt the blood rush to my face.

* * *

We slipped out of in-skip on the outer edge of Mira, the yellow of the planet flooding the bridge with golden light and the baleful eye of the Vortex swirling dead centre of our field of view. The crew stopped and stared for a moment, because the universe was infinite and we hadn't seen everything yet, and even pirates stopped to look at beauty now and then. And the Vortex was beautiful. A gaping maw that spewed hydrogen fitfully into space – a failed sun in an endless search for ignition.

It was routine now, since our run-in with _Argus_ , to scan subspace for Coalition chatter, or for anything that might betray a Coalition presence. We'd got used to the deserted wastes of the outworlds, but since Turas even the smallest of outposts were a potential threat as we moved deeper into the colonies.

'Gaia!' Eddie shouted suddenly from the lower deck, a little louder than he needed to. He was still getting used to life on _Arcadia_ and the demands of the bridge. He was still getting used to his body, too, I reckoned, his voice breaking at times like a teenager's. 'System-wide broadcast,' he added, at a more acceptable level.

I routed the feed to my console. 'Transmission from Gaia Command,' I announced. 'All sector alert.'

Harlock had returned to the bridge during in-skip, had been sitting in his chair for an hour or more while we monitored the transit, so silent and unmoving I think we'd all forgotten he was there. When he didn't respond I had to turn my head to make sure I hadn't been imagining his presence all along.

'Captain?'

He shifted in the chair. Lifted his head from where it had been leaning on his upraised hand. 'On speakers,' he said.

'Aye sir.'

The officious drone of a Gaia functionary filled the bridge. An impersonal robotic intonation with a hint of authoritative threat – a voice carefully designed to instil fear and obedience in the subjugated masses. Yattaran taught me about that. He was always going on about the subjugated masses.

'…all sector alert…' the drone was saying, the subspace signal cracked and warped by distance and the gravity of Mira. 'Reward offered for information leading to the arrest of intergalactic fugitive S-00999 Captain Harlock…'

This was new. My attention was fixed on my console, but I was vaguely aware of movement on the lower command, the exchange of glances and low murmurs of surprise.

The transmission was on a loop, the voice loud and hard as it broke apart in the quiet of _Arcadia's_ bridge. But with it, over it, came a dancing light on the screen – a vidfeed had been layered over the top of the audio transmission. A separate packet, which meant it was for Coalition eyes only. Aimed at those with the need, and the means, to see. My fingers froze on the console, my eyes sliding across to Yattaran at the auxiliary. He looked at me, _what?,_ then routed the feed to his console and stared down at the image displayed there.

'Subversive activities…' the drone continued, the words scattered by static as the image I was looking at simultaneously ghosted over with snow. ' _…_ fugitive considered dangerous…'

The words were garble now, unimportant noise as I refined the signal and stabilised what I was looking at.

'Captain.' I turned uncertainly to face the chair. 'There's a visual.'

Harlock shifted in his chair, glancing sideways at Miimé as she came to stand beside him. He stood, paused for a moment and looked at me, an expression of irritation – or was it apprehension? – tightening his lips.

I stepped away from the console. The droning voice continued with its litany of Harlock's crimes, but I couldn't hear a thing as Harlock moved in to look down at the screen.

The image was old, broken by distance and fragmented by time. An ident from his original service records. Fuller face. Shorter hair. The high collar of a Coalition uniform sitting stiff beneath his chin. The scar still tracked over his cheek, but the most jarring part of the image was his eye. Rather, his eyes. Two clear brown eyes that looked gravely out at us between bursts of white and random static.

Harlock leaned in abruptly and cut the feed.

He stalked back to his chair. Sat down in brooding silence.

* * *

Twelve hours later found me standing in the hall outside the washroom. The door was locked but that didn't hold me back. I cracked it with the override code and stepped inside.

'I'm busy,' Yattaran sang out from where he sat chest-deep in the wide bath. A model of an archaic battleship – the _Midway,_ I knew, because I'd watched him make it – floated in the milky water between his knees.

'So I see.' I walked across to the row of basins and leant over them, looked at myself in the mirror. I'd been growing my hair out of its buzzcut, and a recent bout of laziness had resulted in the beginnings of an impressive set of blond muttonchops. I angled my face to look at them better in the light. 'I'm thinking of keeping these,' I said, scratching my fingernails through them and glancing at Yattaran's reflection in the mirror behind me.

His glare shifted from the back of my head to meet my eyes in the silvered glass. I turned to face him, leaned back against the basin and folded my arms across my chest. 'What the hell do you think that was about?'

His grip shifted on the boat and I watched as his enthusiasm for the game drifted away.

'Yeah,' he said, thinking.

'Yeah,' I echoed. 'What just happened?'

'Seems to me,' he said, his eyes on the boat, 'like Captain's past just caught up with him.'

'Yeah,' I said again, because that much was clear. 'But how did Gaia Command _know?'_

He looked up at me. Without his glasses his eyes were big and blue and rimmed faintly in red. 'Seems like they always knew.'

'I don't buy it. _Arcadia_ looks nothing like _Deathshadow_. Not anymore.' I stared unblinking into his eyes. _'_ So how did they know?'

'Energy signature.' He shrugged, the movement making a little plinking sound in the water. 'Dark matter leaves a trail. Every time _Arcadia_ drops out of in-skip she leaves a piece of herself. Like a fingerprint.'

'You think it's possible the Coalition has been following _Arcadia's_ fingerprints? _For a hundred years?'_

'It's possible,' he shrugged. 'I would say probable.'

'The ident packet,' I said, remembering the image of Harlock from a hundred years ago. 'How could they know it was Harlock? After all this time… how could they know he was even still alive?'

He shifted in the milky water. 'Seems like they've known about Harlock from the start. Captain's fooling himself if he thought he was invisible all this time. They might have lost him when he was out in the territories. Or any time he was away from the colonies. But every time _Arcadia_ moved in and out of in-skip they'd know where he'd been. They've probably been one step behind him the whole time.'

He fumbled a hand to where his glasses rested on the edge of the bath and slid them onto his nose. 'Maybe they even know his plan.'

'Come on.' I unlocked my arms, dropped my hands to my sides and folded my fingers around the cool edge of the basin. 'How?'

'The oscillators. He stole them from Gaia Command, and Gaia Command are not as stupid as we like to think. It wouldn't have taken them long to put two and two together.'

I adjusted my ass against the metal of the sink. So Harlock had been in their sights the whole time and the Coalition had been reading him like a book. They'd been playing the long game – the longest game of them all.

'Now what?' I asked. 'How does Harlock… how do _we_ stay one step ahead?'

Yattaran snorted lightly. 'Captain's not stupid either. He hasn't been doing this for all this time and learnt nothing.'

'Maybe…' I stared down at the first mate, '…maybe Harlock wants them to know.'

Yattaran shifted in the tub, sent ripples sliding across the surface of the water.

'Maybe,' I continued, 'he wants to look the Coalition in the eye when he sets the oscillators off.'

Yattaran raised the boat into the air, watched as water ran from it in a steadily diminishing stream. It was uncomfortable to think about things this way. To think that maybe we were pawns in Harlock's hundred-year end-game.

'Now what?' I asked again, my eyes on the steady drip-drip-drip of water into the tub. There had to be more to it than this. Harlock had saved us. All of us. We owed him in blood. And whatever game he was playing, we were all of us in it to the end. 'Now they've stepped up the chase, what will Harlock do?'

'If I know Captain,' Yattaran said, placing the boat carefully on the edge of the tub, 'he'll give them something to _really_ worry about.'


	4. Part 4

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part four)**

* * *

Harlock got himself a new flightsuit. A black affair with armour plates riveted strategically into place, and a white skull-and-crossbones emblazoned square across the chest. And a cape with blood-red lining and ragged around the edges as though it had been worn a lot before, sometime in the distant past.

The effect was striking. He seemed taller. Stronger. Colder. Like he'd taken one step back from everyone. And everything.

There were days when he'd stand at the wheel and stare down at the crew in the lower command, as though it was all too much. Like it was more responsibility than he could handle.

And there were days when I fully expected him to dump us on the nearest planet and disappear into the sunset.

* * *

'Captain!'

The shout cut through the silence on the bridge, made us look up from our consoles and turn around in surprise.

There was scuffling from the entry port, a woman's voice shouting 'hands off!', the sound of an open palm meeting an unshaven face and a grunt that could only have come from Carlos. We watched incredulous as a twisting spitting ball of ragged clothes and blonde hair was dragged protesting onto the bridge and hoisted bodily in front of the captain.

Yattaran started from his station. 'Aahhh,' he said in a fluster of confusion and dismay.

'Stowaway, Cap'n,' Carlos announced, removing his hand from the scruff of the girl's neck. 'Found her in the cargo bay, inside a crate of argonite.'

Harlock's head tilted back in his chair, the single eye appraising the cause of the commotion.

Without Carlos holding her upright the girl staggered awkwardly a moment before righting herself. 'Hands off,' she spat again, throwing a contemptuous glare back at Carlos. He laughed at her. Evilly. Rubbed at the handprint reddening on his face.

'Aahhh…' said Yattaran again. Heads were going to roll for this, possibly one of them his. 'Who checked that cargo,' he demanded.

Carlos shrugged. He hadn't been dirtside when the crates were loaded. Didn't matter. Yattaran would find the culprit. Eventually.

Harlock's gaze travelled the length of the girl's body, his eye coming back to rest on her dirt-smeared face. 'The argonite?'

'Half load,' Carlos said. 'She must have dumped the rest before she got into the crate.'

The captain rose from his chair, towered a good twelve inches over the girl. She stared at his chest, at the skull and crossbones she was abruptly eye-to-eye with.

'Unfortunate,' Harlock said to the top of her head. 'Because I need that argonite.'

'You heard Captain,' Yattaran barked at Carlos. 'Get the transport back down there.'

Carlos shot Yattaran an aggrieved glare. He opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it and closed his mouth again. He turned on his heels, mouth twisting in anger as he cast a final backward glance at the girl.

Harlock continued his survey of the top of the girl's head, her hair lank and knotted and matted with something that looked like spider webs. But there were no spiders on Sertse, so who knows what that cobwebby shit was. But the hair was golden beneath the filth, and there was probably a pretty face under all that grime. For her part the girl continued to stare at the Captain's chest, the sight of the skull no doubt providing an urgent sense of seriousness to her situation – that she'd just stowed aboard the _Arcadia_ and, if she'd been keeping up with the Coalition broadcasts, was standing one short step away from the most wanted fugitive in the galaxy.

Harlock stretched the silence out for a long uncomfortable moment, the fingers curling inside his gloves the only outward display of the thought processes going on within. His mouth twitched into what might have been the fleeting start of a smile as he stretched his fingers out and moved close enough to the girl that she tensed and swayed back, a breathy gasp escaping from her lips. And then Harlock veered away from her, moved around her, so close to her she would have felt the sting of the dark matter as he passed, the edge of his cloak catching like fingers at her clothing. He paced the length of the gantry to the wheel and placed a hand carefully upon it.

'Name,' he said, to the wheel.

We all turned to look at the girl. She hadn't moved when the captain had scraped past her, stood staring fixedly at the vacated throne.

'Hey,' Yattaran called out. 'Girl! Captain asked you a question.'

She turned, slowly, ignored Yattaran's affronted glare and said to the taciturn shadow at the wheel, 'Yuki.' She swallowed, and if we'd been able to see through the shapeless outfit she was wearing, I'm sure we would have seen her tremble. 'Yuki Kei.'

At least her voice wasn't shaking. I raised my eyebrows at nobody in particular – bigger men than she was would have crumbled well before this point.

Yattaran leaned back against his console and folded his arms. 'Yuki Kei,' he said gravely, 'what sort of punishment do you think we reserve for stowaways?'

She shot him a look and suddenly there was fire in her eyes. Whatever punishment she had coming she was apparently prepared to take it. And then some.

'What are you going to do?' She sneered as she sized him up and evidently dismissed him as a light-weight. 'Put me over your lap and spank me?'

Yattaran's eyes popped behind his glasses. His arms unfolded abruptly from his chest and he started forward in anger, one hand clenching into a fist. 'You little…' he began. 'I _will_ bend you over – '

'First mate.'

Yattaran stopped mid-stride, fist falling thwarted to his side. Pulling rank always had that effect.

'Captain,' he acknowledged, eyes still on the defiant glare of the girl. He would never admit as much but he was enjoying it. Yattaran liked a challenge. And a pretty lady.

Harlock hadn't moved, hadn't turned. Only his cloak showed any sign of life as it lifted in the unseen draft from the recirculators. 'Allocate a berth,' he said, without turning around.

Yattaran's lips pursed in dismay, but there was no point arguing once the captain had made a decision. He shot a look of 'why me?' in my direction then lunged forward and pushed an aggressive finger into the girl's shoulder. 'I guess now we'll see what you're made of. Move.' He continued to poke her towards the nearest access. 'You'd better not fuck this up,' he muttered at her back as she quickstepped along in front of him. 'Don't make Captain regret it,' he said. And then, 'you'd better not give me any trouble.'

I shook my head as I took over the XO. Yuki Kei was going to be hearing those scintillating one-liners all the way to the crew quarters.

In the blessed silence Harlock angled around to look at me. Raised his eyebrow.

* * *

I leaned in to the mirror and slid the razor across the plane of my cheek, carefully sculpting a straight line along the edge of a muttonchop. Facial hair was fast becoming a pain in the ass. I paused the razor for a moment and briefly considered shaving them off. Or doing what some of the other men did – giving up on any pretence of caring and letting my beard grow completely wild.

'Ari.' Farris's head appeared around the bathroom door. 'Captain says suit up.' He looked pointedly at the lather on my face, at the towel tied loose around my hips and sliding with the speed of cold tar towards the floor. 'And he says _now.'_

I hitched the towel up with my free hand as his head disappeared again behind the door.

'Farris,' I called out. His head reappeared, a big red disembodied face bright against the pale grey of the bathroom walls. 'What's going on?'

'Trouble,' he said with his customary eloquence, adding a shrug as if I should have already guessed that.

I reached for another towel and wiped at the soap on my face. 'Care to elaborate?'

'The node. It's on the Proxima moon.'

My hands froze in their movement. 'Shit.'

'Yeah,' he said. 'Shit alright.'

I dropped the towel to the bench. 'Get going. Tell Captain I'm on my way.'

* * *

There were twelve of us in the transport as it approached the base. Thirteen including the captain, but only twelve of us were sweating inside the burnished plates of our battle armour. Harlock himself never sweated. And he had nothing other than his cloak for protection – and a gravity sabre swinging at his hip, an archaic relic of a time even before the Homecoming War.

We were crowded in the rear of the transport, all of us squeezed into the cargo bay jump seats, staring silently at each other as we swung in low over the Proxima moon. Baptiste was at the controls, and I turned in my seat to look into the cockpit, manoeuvring the body armour awkwardly in the restricted space and jostling Carlos out of his half-doze in the process. I looked at the back of Baptiste's head, the reflected light from the moon haloing through the roughly combed mop of his hair.

The Proxima moon was legend. The last stand of the sector war, the place where the forces of Tarsus and the Coalition met in one last, decisive battle. The Coalition won, of course, their resources far exceeding those of the average breakaway system. The damage to the morale of the sector was incalculable. The damage to the moon much more visible, with great black gouges dug out of the pale pink surface. Beyond Baptiste's head I could see craters and chasms, their edges charred and littered with the glint of twisted metal. Carcasses of ships lay smashed across the dead plains, broken and twisted and burned. There were probably still people aboard them, strapped in their seats, their bodies as broken and twisted and burned as their ships. Snap-frozen in their agonies and waiting, still, for somebody to come and bury them.

And in the ashes of the Tarsus defeat the Coalition had left an outpost. Settled themselves brazenly down in the middle of a graveyard. It was Gaia marking its territory, like a dog pissing against a wall.

'Baptiste,' Harlock said to the pilot, breaking my train of thought. 'Signal the base. Request permission to dock.'

Baptiste turned his head in acknowledgement, his profile dark against the light of the moon. 'Aye, sir.'

Beside me Carlos laughed and I jabbed at him with an elbow, the clank of armour against armour unexpectedly loud over the muted hum of the engines.

'What?' He tried to move away from me, butting up hard against Dan beside him on the jump seat.

'Hey,' Dan grumbled, his voice thick with sleep. I swear that dude could sleep anywhere. He shoved Carlos grunting back in my direction and back into the sharp point of my elbow.

'Ladies,' Yattaran groused from the bench opposite. 'Nix it.'

I left my elbow locked hard against Carlos and looked across at the captain, his head still turned in the direction of the cockpit as Baptiste awaited acknowledgement from the base. He was lost in contemplation, the light of the moon brushing the edge of his profile in pale lines of pink.

Carlos laughed again, a deep throaty rumble that vibrated though his armour and into mine. 'They'll never let us land.'

'Doesn't matter what they do.' Yattaran leaned forward and lifted his battle-axe from where it rested on the floor, laid it carefully across his knees. 'As long as they're busy looking at us they won't be looking at Santo and Maji deploying the oscillator on the far side.'

'And if they shoot us down,' Roy said from the far end of the bay, putting voice to what all of us were thinking, 'they'll be too busy watching the pretty fireworks.'

Bob snorted inside his armour. 'None of us are that pretty.'

That brought a laugh from all of us, quirking even the Captain's mouth into a smile and sparking off a good-natured jostling amongst the men, a lot of nudging and knee-slapping, a moment of mirth that was cut short as quickly as it had erupted.

'Captain,' Baptiste called from the cockpit. 'They have a weapons lock.'

That shut us up. Made us grip our weapons just that little bit tighter.

'Ignore it,' Harlock said. He rose, stretched out his long limbs and stooped to enter the cockpit.

Baptiste looked up at him. 'They're requesting identification.'

Harlock turned to look back at us, gave our state of readiness a quick survey. And then he nodded. 'Tell them.'

* * *

We were expecting the white armour of the Coalition space corps, but these were combat troops, a field army garrisoned in a deadzone just for their looks. A squad of twenty had arranged themselves stiffly across the deck, their uniforms padded out with laser webbing, their weapons held tensely at the ready.

'Sitting ducks,' Yattaran quipped through the suit coms as we exited the transport and stationed ourselves in opposition along the deck. He flexed his fingers confidently around the haft of his axe.

'You mean us, or them?' Bob stage-whispered back at him.

There was a chorus of nervous laughs through the coms, but I didn't join in. We were trained well, and twelve to twenty was more than good odds, but this could still go horribly wrong. I nestled the repeater into the crook of my elbow, pressed my finger close against the trigger.

The Coalition squad assumed the position in front of us, textbook formation, some of them dropping to one knee to better their aim. That would have made me laugh, except they were too close for comfort. Their faces were enhanced by the heads-up display of my helmet – I could see the whites of their eyes, the sweat at their temples, the heat bleeding through the thinner points of the webbing in their uniforms. I counted off the weak spots as my armour's targeting system followed the movement of my eyes and left little green crosshairs wherever my pupils had lingered.

Harlock was last to exit the transport, the heels of his boots clicking crisply against the metal deck as he casually strode the line. He made an imposing sight – the long, black-clad legs languid in their stride, the cloak billowing around him with a mind of its own and revealing, now and then, the lean pelvis crossed by the twin holsters, and the skull-and-crossbones stamped white across his chest. There was an easy grace in his movement, and control, and a shadowed hint of menace, and when he reached the centre of the line and turned to face the enemy, his gaze made not a few of them flinch.

The commander of the garrison, however, was apparently not the kind of man that flinched. He stood in direct opposition to Harlock, and to us, at the front of his squad and with an expression of unadulterated glee chasing across a face that was begging for the shit to be beaten out of it.

'Captain Harlock,' the commander said, his voice accented with the thick honey of culture, of a man who'd been born in the heart of the Communion. 'So the stories were true – you _did_ survive. I never thought I would meet you in the flesh.' He cocked his head and looked the captain up and down. 'Assuming you are still made of flesh.'

A sly smile passed across his face, and he took a step forward, as if greeting an old friend. 'What an honour. And what a _pleasure_ it will be to bring you in.' He brought his feet carefully together, slid a confident hand to rest on the weapon at his hip and bowed with solemn formality. 'I am Saito, Commander of this outpost.'

He raised his head, waiting for an acknowledgement that was never going to come. He stared at Harlock for a moment, pursed his lips in disappointment at the lengthening silence, and when the requisite waiting period had passed he cast a careful and appraising look at the rest of us arrayed behind the captain, weapons lowered a little off-target, but not quite enough. 'This is an interesting mode of surrender, I must say. But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to hand over your – '

Harlock shifted inside his cloak. 'This is not a surrender.'

Saito paused, mouth open, eyes back on Harlock. 'What, then?' He raised a curious eyebrow. 'A robbery? Ludicrous. Look at where you are.'

The squad behind him shifted in their ranks, fingers itching on their triggers. A few of them broke out into nervous smiles, but I could still see the sweat that dotted their brows.

'No.' Harlock was still, his body tight. 'Not a robbery.'

Saito stared at him silently. Watchfully. 'What, then,' he asked again, his shoulders rising in vague confusion.

Harlock's gaze never left its target. 'Call it… a distraction.'

Saito laughed. A short sharp bark of genuine mirth. 'A comedian!' He laughed again, but the smile never reached his eyes. 'Captain, this is not what I expected. History treats you somewhat more seriously… as befits a criminal of your catastrophic standing.'

I couldn't see Harlock's face from where I stood, to his rear and to his right, and besides I was too busy scanning the squadron for signs of movement. Watching their hands on their weapons. Waiting for the narrowing of an eye, or the tightening of a lip that could indicate trouble.

'Ah,' Saito said, filling Harlock's silence with the irritating hiss of his voice. 'Not so funny anymore.' He cocked his head, surveyed Harlock's face with a cool and calculating gaze. 'You've changed since you last graced Gaia Command. We all have. Some of us have grown older,' he sighed, 'and some of us have grown… different.' He widened his smile, showed us his small white teeth, darted his black eyes beyond Harlock towards the rest of us, and back to Harlock again.

'You may not know this, but you are required reading at Officer's Academy,' he continued, enjoying the sound of his own voice and with the sickly smile still plastered to his face. 'The perfect example of what an officer must _not_ to do.'

Harlock's head cocked to one side. Possibly he was smiling. Possibly it was a ploy to draw attention away from his hand shifting beneath his cloak, the movement faintly visible as a rippling at his elbow.

And then Saito chuckled, an evil vicious thing that echoed loud in the hanger as he returned calmly to stand at the apex of his squad. 'There are other stories, of course. Of souls sold to the devil. Or to that Nibelung bitch you betrayed us with.'

If he had any idea how close he was to danger, there was no indication of it on his face. Or in his words. Or in the carefully cultivated nonchalance of his stance. I could see Yattaran shifting on his feet, fingers opening and closing on the haft of his axe. If Harlock didn't shut Saito's dirty mouth, one of us was sure to do it.

'Captain Harlock,' Saito said, his voice hardening with the certainty that he had Harlock right where he wanted him. 'Fugitive S-00999.' He raised a white-gloved hand, encompassed the universe with a single, negligent flick of the wrist. 'We _all_ know exactly what you – '

Time slowed. Freeze-framed into a jagged slash of movement that erupted in a whirl of black and red and blood spinning weightless into the air. There was no time for Saito to unholster the weapon at his hip. No chance even for him to register what was happening, was about to happen, as Harlock exploded into movement, the gravity sabre sliding from its sheath as he leapt the short distance to Saito, the sabre glinting through the air and slicing through the uniform buttoned tight around Saito's throat, melting its way through collar and skin and muscle and bone. Saito's words were severed in his throat at the same moment as his head was severed from his body, sent spinning blinking through the air on a fountain of rich, red blood. I watched as the commander's face whirled towards me in slow-motion, the mouth working dumbly as the eyes registered their surprise. I swear those two black eyes were looking right at me, the question that widened them silent but horrifyingly apparent – _what the fuck am I doing flying through the air?_ I turned away from the questioning eyes, the silent gaping mouth, took a step backwards as the head landed with the sickening thud of cracking bone at my feet.

There was a moment of silence. A moment to register the head impacting hard on the deck. The hot explosion of blood from Saito's raw, quivering neck. The body, deprived of its pilot, slumping into the thick red puddle on the floor. The squadron, wiping the blood from their eyes, their voices erupting into incoherent screaming as suddenly all weapons were brought to bear in our direction. And us, impervious in our armour as we ripped efficiently through them, cutting them down before they even had a chance to aim.

* * *

There was silence as Baptiste steered us away from the base, a transport full of contemplative faces burned with the hard reality of what had happened on the Proxima moon. This wasn't a game anymore. It was a war. It was us and them and life and death and blood. Too much blood.

I looked at where Harlock sat across from me in the transport, crimson splashed wild on his boots and crusted to the end of his sabre. He slumped in his seat, head bowed, gloved fingers splayed tight across his thighs. He might have been asleep, if it weren't for the twitching of his jaw behind the curtain of his hair.

I stared at him, willed him to move with the invisible pressure of my eyes.

He stirred under the onslaught, straightened in his seat and lifted his head to meet my stare, lips forming into a faintly apologetic smile.

* * *

Midnight. Well, what passes for midnight on a ship that moves in eternal darkness.

I was alone in the mess, the last of the late diners, slouched in my chair and staring at the crumbs that dotted the table. I pushed away my plate and flattened the nearest crumb beneath a fingertip.

'Penny for your thoughts,' Miimé said, from where she hovered in the doorway.

'Nobody knows what a penny is anymore,' I said without looking up. But we still knew the saying. It was buried in our DNA – along with our hair colour and our eye colour and our pathetic penchant for clinging to the faded memories of Earth.

'Who taught you that,' I asked, wondering what sentimental bastard had been filling Miimé's head with crap. And when. And what else they'd been telling her.

She moved into the room, slid soundlessly into the chair opposite. Our feet touched beneath the table.

'I learnt it long ago,' she said, placing a half-empty bottle of wine on the table-top between us. 'When I was being taught about humans. And how to live with them.'

'So they taught you pointless words, hoping you'd fit in.' I straightened in the chair, moved my feet away from hers. 'Stupid, empty words. Stupid things of Earth that are lost and gone that we aren't allowed to forget. Like green grass and blue skies and white fluffy clouds.' I bit down on the inside of my lip and stared at the dirty table-top, swept the crumbs off it with the flat of my hand. I'd never seen a blue sky in my life.

'Your eyes are like the sky,' she said.

I snorted. 'When did you ever see a blue sky?'

'Harlock has.'

I looked up at her, let her take the question out of my head.

She shrugged. 'It's a memory he has. The place in his head that he visits the most.'

I stared at her, blue eyes challenging green. And then I asked, because I really wanted to know, 'what place do I visit the most?'

'You know.'

She lifted the bottle and proffered it towards me, her fingers blue and luminous against the darkness of the wine. I reached slowly across the table, my eyes still on hers, my fingers curling warm around her coolness as she languidly relinquished her grip. I had a vision of her suddenly, entwined with Harlock, and him burning hot and bright against the cool lightness of her being.

I stared into the cat-green of her eyes, wondered if that was a memory she had given me, or if that was the place I went to the most.

I lifted the bottle to my lips, tasted her against my tongue.

'What's happening, Miimé?' I put the bottle back on the table, let the wine fill my mouth with sweet and warmth. 'What are we doing?'

She said nothing. Silently wrapped her fingers back around the bottle.

I leaned back in my chair and stretched my legs out beneath the table. Felt them brush against hers. Felt a slim ankle press against my own.

She was playing with me. Had been playing with me since that first night in the medbay, back when I'd thought she was a ghost.

She raised the bottle to her mouth, tilted it towards her small, pale lips.

She must have known what men were like. What humans were like. How we moved according to where our blood wanted us to go. And when she leaned towards me, and breathed on me, looked into my eyes and took the thoughts out of my head, she must have known where my blood was taking me.


	5. Part 5

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part five)**

* * *

I watched critically as Kei leaned over the weapons command, her thighs flush against the console as she studied the calibration readouts. I might have wished she hadn't chosen such a tight … yes, tight is definitely the word … flightsuit. The rounded peach of her ass was drawing way too much attention on the lower command. I glanced around at the day crew, scowling at Bob staring open-mouthed as Kei shifted a little in place, bending one knee and pushing one ass-check further up into the air as a result. _C'mon, man,_ I said to him with my eyes, hoping he'd get the message and look away, but he continued his slack-jawed staring. I could almost see the drool quivering on the edge of his lip.

'So,' I said to her, turning away from Bob and his drool, 'recalibration is only required when _Arcadia_ has taken a direct hit on the batteries during engagement, or, more often, after we've rammed another vessel.'

She straightened at the console and turned her big blue eyes on me. Damn, those lashes were long. 'Rammed another vessel?' she repeated with some surprise.

'Captain's favourite strategy,' Santo said from further down the command. He took a few steps away from his station, pumping a fist into the air as he did so. 'Captain likes to ram them right up the – '

'Hey,' I snapped.

Santo stopped midstroke, the grin still on his face and his arm still lifted into the air, the bicep flexing nicely and he knew it. The grin widened as he brought the bicep to his lips and kissed it, the action drawing a round of laughter from the rest of the crew.

'Give me a break,' Kei sighed wearily.

'You and me both. I'm about ready to throw up.' I turned my back on Santo's nauseating display of self-love and gave my attention back to Kei, my eyes roving helplessly across her hair, her skin, the moist pink bud of her mouth...

I coughed. 'Now, as I was saying – '

'Incoming transmission,' Roy cut in, saving me from having to suck back a bit of drool myself.

I didn't bother to look up. 'Source?'

'Sol sector.'

I rolled my eyes. 'Not another wanted broadcast.'

'Not this time. It's an open channel. Ship to ship.'

I turned to look at him.

'For the captain,' he added, surprise tinging the edge of his voice.

Silence descended on the deck. My eyes flickered towards the command. 'Patch it through upstairs.'

'Aye.'

I turned to face the upper command. I couldn't see Harlock from down here, but I could see Yattaran's head over the top of his console. I watched as he acknowledged receipt of the transfer, his face carefully schooling itself towards neutral before he turned to the captain.

'Incoming comms, Captain,' Yattaran said, his voice loud enough that I didn't need to strain to hear. 'Ship to ship.'

Harlock's response was inaudible, but I could imagine what it might have been. As disinterested as I'd anticipated, because Yattaran's next words were, 'Sol sector. They want to talk to you.' Yattaran's back remained turned to us so I couldn't see his face, but I could well imagine the expression that was creasing his brow as he waited for orders.

I continued staring at the upper deck. I was conscious of Kei close by my side, the outline of her breasts just making it into my peripheral vision. It had been a long time since we'd had anything as lovely to look at as Kei, and I was having as much trouble as the rest of the men keeping my eyes from drifting off-target. And right now they were drifting off target. A waft of air from the recirculators stirred the hair that rested on her shoulders, and I caught the faint scent of her. Fortunately for my libido she smelled as non-descript as the rest of us, being scrubbed with the same soap. Oh well. I had no doubt that would change the next time we made landfall.

I slid my eyes as nonchalantly as I could back to the upper deck, hoping I hadn't been caught looking at the things I was trying so hard not to look at. I was supposed to be setting an example, an order tasked to me by the captain. 'The men must treat her as an equal,' he'd said, in a tone that brooked no argument. 'It might help if you tell them think of her as a sister. Or,' his voice softened, 'like Miimé.' At the mention of Miimé my face had flushed and I'd coughed into my hand and looked away. He did _not_ want to know what kinds of things I thought about Miimé. When I turned back to him there was a half-smile playing across his lips. I think he already knew.

By now the entire crew had stopped what they were doing and were milling around silently, glancing at each other with curiosity in their eyes. Santo scratched absently at the side of his face, his eyes catching mine as my gaze wandered along the row of solemn faces. A direct comm from Sol sector could only mean one thing, since Gaia had effectively sanctioned the entire system and guarded it as rabidly as a dog guarded a bone.

Kei glanced around the suddenly silent bridge and turned her head to look at me, her mouth forming into a perfect pink 'O' as the inevitable question prepared to launch itself from her lips. I shook my head to keep her lovely mouth shut and directed her attention to the upper command with a flick of my eyes. Harlock had left his chair by now and had measuredly paced the gantry to stand at the wheel. He stared down at us, an indefinable expression passing across his face as he met our curious stares, the cloak billowing around his ankles as he surveyed his domain. 'First mate,' he said, lifting his head as Yattaran activated the overhead screen and flooded the deck with light.

There was a moment of static as the image buffered and Yattaran filtered out the interference from the thousand star systems between us and Sol. And then a man's face filled the screen, a pale, angry man bearing all the hallmarks of the Coalition officer class – collar too tight around his throat, hair too short on his head and skin too tight over a too-narrow skull. They all had that look – when they were young, that is. When they got old they got yellow and fat from living high on all the life they stole from the colonies. This particular specimen was still young, with a face drawn tight and pale from a distinct lack of blood. Or maybe that was the white of his skull bleeding through.

He stared down from the viewscreen at Harlock, eyes narrow behind a pair of wire-frame spectacles that looked like they never left their perch on the high, thin nose. Beneath that sat a hard, contemptuous mouth that gave the impression its owner existed in a constant state of barely controlled rage. I felt my own mouth hardening as I looked at him and hoped we'd never have the misfortune of meeting this one in person. Men like that, they weren't human. They'd had all the humanity sucked out of them by the merciless machine of the Coalition. And then that cold, hard mouth moved and he began to speak, calm and methodical as though he were reading from a well-rehearsed script.

'Captain Harlock,' he said officiously, so officiously he made me want to spit. 'I am Isora, Commander of the Coalition Armada.'

My eyes moved to the epaulettes bolted to the blue shoulders of his uniform – three gold bars. He was nowhere near fat enough or old enough for the rank, and I wondered fleetingly who he'd had to part cheek for to get that position. I turned my attention back to the uncompromising face and realised with sudden clarity that this man would part cheek for nobody. He looked like he'd sell out his mother if it would get him what he wanted – he was a giver of pain, not a taker.

The Commander continued, his eyes two hard blue balls behind his glasses. 'This communication is to be considered a declaration of intent from Gaia Command. Any lack of cooperation in your surrender will be considered an indictable offense, punishable under section seventy-six of Sanction Criminal Code.'

He stopped talking. Stared down at Harlock and waited.

Harlock stared back. Measured the man with his single good eye, an expression of faint contempt passing fleetingly across his face. 'What do you want, Commander?'

The Commander's lips settled in a thin, white line. 'I require acknowledgement that you understand this declaration, and I am authorised to negotiate the terms and conditions of your surrender.'

Harlock moved. Shifted inside his cloak. Cocked his head as if he was truly interested. 'And what are my crimes?'

The Commander lifted a white-gloved hand to adjust the spectacles on his nose, thought twice about it and lowered his hand again. 'Apart from a series of more recent criminal activities that include destruction of Coalition properties, felony and murder, there remains a warrant outstanding for your arrest.' The thin mouth curled into a smile. 'The warrant has been outstanding for a number of years.'

Harlock smiled back. 'Then I acknowledge your declaration. However, there will be no surrender.'

The Commander's face whitened a shade. 'You are ordered hereby to present yourself for surrender immediately, along with all members of your crew. You will also surrender your ship for decommission.' And then he added, cryptically, 'it is far too dangerous to be left in the hands of a man who has demonstrated his unfitness for command of such a weapon… to such devastating effect.'

Harlock lowered his head, placed a hand on the wheel, ran a thumb carefully along the grain. 'Old history,' he murmured, just loud enough for Isora to hear. He looked up again, carefully met the Commander's eyes. 'I am currently in the business of making new history.'

Isora's mouth twisted, the rigid lips parting to display a row of even, white teeth. He was having trouble concealing his anger, and I had the distinct impression that this one wouldn't live long enough to get fat.

'New history,' he mocked, contempt dripping from his words. 'We know about your plan to return to Earth, Harlock. We know why you stole the oscillators. Did you think that a hundred years would be long enough to conceal your true intent? A hundred years or a thousand, no amount of years could hide you from us.'

Oh yeah, this dude was definitely not going to live long enough to get fat.

'You are all traitors to Gaia,' he said, his voice rising in anger, 'and traitors and scum like yourselves are not welcome on Earth. If you – '

'As I recall,' Harlock interrupted, 'nobody is welcome on Earth.'

Isora straightened his shoulders, eyes glinting behind the wire-frames of his glasses. 'And who is responsible for that?'

Harlock's eye narrowed. He stared whitely at Isora, the change in him palpable. I found myself unconsciously stepping back, my elbow bumping blind into the soft parts of Kei where she stood beside me at the console. She slid out from under me, her profile smooth and clear as she gazed up at the captain.

'If you do not cease all activities and voluntarily surrender yourself,' the Commander was continuing, his voice as tight with anger as his face, 'our orders are to destroy you and your crew and your ship. If you attempt to enter the Sol system, we _will_ take you down.'

Contempt crooked Harlock's lips. 'You can try.'

He raised a hand for Yattaran to cut the transmission, the first mate obliging with a speed I wouldn't have ordinarily thought possible. Our last view of Isora was one of impotence personified as the tight mouth opened in blind retort just before the image dissolved into a mash of pixels and static.

There was silence on the bridge. It felt like even the ship was holding its breath, and I was conscious of us floating, isolated and alone in the cold wastes of space. Harlock remained where he was, one hand clamped tight on the wheel and the great arc of the dark matter generator glinting in the dim light as it rotated slowly behind him. A look passed across his face, a fleeting shadow of doubt that creased the corner of his eye and tightened the edges of his lips.

'We have eleven oscillators still to deploy,' he said, breaking the silence at last. 'Eleven more systems until we can return to Earth and reset the universe.' He stared down at the lower command, looked at our faces upturned towards him, met each of our gazes one by one. Turned to Miimé as she came to stand beside him.

'This is our chance to do it over,' he said, hitting us all in the place where we hurt the most. We all had our pain and our grief and our loss, and we all had our reasons to see the universe start over. To give ourselves the chance to live our lives again.

I shifted on my feet, glanced sideways at Kei beside to me. She stared up at the captain, eyes bright with trust and a longing that I recognised with a pang of understanding. She moistened her lips, her tongue darting briefly out as she caught her bottom lip with her teeth.

'You heard the Commander of the fleet,' Harlock was saying. 'The Coalition plans to keep us from Earth. To keep us from completing our mission. To keep us from our one true home.'

He paused as a murmur of voices rose from the deck, raised a hand palm-down and curled it into a decisive fist.

'We will target any ship that identifies itself as Coalition,' he said over the rising chorus of agreement. 'Anything from Gaia Command.'

His voice grew hard, his face cold. 'We will take away their support systems, their supply chains, their munitions. Anything destined for Coalition outposts, we will take it or we will destroy it.'

He looked down at the crew on the lower deck, his gaze roving from one upturned face to another.

'We will cripple them.'

* * *

 _Arcadia's_ mess hall was enormous, a relic from the time when _Arcadia_ wasn't _Arcadia_ and, according to the data still stored in the underlayers of the mainframe, sported a crew of four hundred. It was hard to imagine the now-empty corridors crawling with men and activity. Harder still to imagine Harlock commanding that many subordinates. We were now a slim forty, and the Captain's command style must have been a far cry from his days in the Coalition. These days he was hardly hands-on – mostly he left us to our own devices, endowing us with a trust that none of us would ever break. Although, maybe, some of us had finally hit breaking point – it was one thing to be dicking around with local forces, quite another to know that your captain had just officially declared war and that the combined artilleries of the entire Coalition were now aimed directly at your head.

The day-crew had commandeered a corner of the mess, hunching together around a table and chewing morosely on the day's offerings. Forty crew and not a single one of us could cook. In the interests of fair play we were working on a roster system – a task that some of the men attacked with as much gusto as they gave to washing their armpits. Until we found somebody who could actually use a frypan we were doomed to an endless stream of 'delicacies' from as many worlds as we had crewmen. Varro and Dan were on shift tonight, and while Dan's _pan de Arcadia_ was still stuck to my back teeth, Varro had proved once again that he knew how to stew meat. I poked at the puddle of gravy on my plate and lifted a forkful of something gelatinously solid to the light… if that was meat we'd been eating, that is. I slid whatever it was into my mouth and found my eyes wandering to Kei sitting beside me, wondering when would be an appropriate time to ask her the burning question, _can you cook?_ , and wondering how hard she could slap. Oh yeah, that's right. Carlos had sported Kei's hand-shaped bruise on his chops for a couple of days, and I found myself sniggering unexpectedly at the memory.

'What's so funny?'

I looked up as Baptiste slid into the chair opposite and delicately separated a bone out of the mess on his plate. It was definitely meat, but exactly what kind and where the hell it had come from was anybody's guess.

'Nuthin',' I shrugged, spearing at another chunk on the plate.

'Something seems funny,' he said in that indefinable accent that was by degrees pleasant and annoying in turns.

'I said it was nothing.' I sat back in my chair and looked up to find a half-dozen pair of eyes solemnly staring at me, the other half-dozen solemnly staring at their plates. The confrontation with Isora had rattled them. Hell, it had rattled me – the cold threat in the Commander's voice, matched by the equal threat in Harlock's own. And while in the heat of the moment the men on deck had supported Harlock's declaration of war, it seemed that now, under the cold light of the cavernous mess, some of us were having second thoughts.

I put the fork down and pushed the plate away, turned to look at Yattaran at the far end of the table.

'First mate,' I said, waiting 'til his eyes slid up to meet my own. 'Time to tell us what you know.'

'What,' he said, his eyes wide and his lips slack with surprise. 'What do I know about what?'

Dan took up the argument from behind the servery, saving me from having to do it. 'Don't play dumb,' he said, wiping his hands on a towel. 'Tell us what you know about Captain's plan.'

Yattaran turned to look at Dan, looked back at me, looked with his watering eyes at the other faces now turned expectantly towards him, sighed and leaned back in his chair. 'Nothing,' he said resignedly. 'Nothing more than any of the rest of you know.'

'I don't believe you,' Dan said, coming out from behind the counter and plopping down in the closest chair. 'You're second-in-command. Captain must have told you something.'

Yattaran glared at Dan and chewed on the inside of his lip. He turned his head abruptly and fixed the glare on me. 'Why don't you ask Ari,' he said, his pale blue gaze fixed angrily on my own. 'He's spent more time with Captain than the rest of us.'

It was true, I'd spent more time with Harlock than anyone, bar Miimé. But that was just drinking – Harlock didn't offer information, and I never asked. Besides, Harlock held his liquor better than me, which meant I was usually the first one mopping the floor with my face.

I gave Yattaran the death-stare and was surprised when his face didn't melt off. For some reason that always surprised me. 'That's pleasure, not business.'

'Bullshit,' Yattaran grumbled. 'If anybody knows anything, it's you.'

I leaned calmly forward in my chair and said, quietly, 'well, I don't. You wanna take this outside, Sunshine?'

'Bah,' he said, batting a hand disgustedly in the air.

I sat back in my chair. I'd save it for later – I knew when Yattaran took his baths, and I sent him an evil smirk to put him on the alert.

'What about the oscillators?' Baptiste said, his accent lending a peculiar emphasis to the word 'oscillators.' 'When they're detonated, what will they do?'

Yattaran ignored the threat in my smile and nodded once more in my direction. 'Ask the Professor here.' Jesus H, but the little shit was determined to put me in it.

Baptiste turned to look at me. He was getting the run-around and it was clearly pissing him off. 'How do the oscillators work? How do they reset the universe?'

'How the hell would I know?' I replied defensively. 'My doctorate didn't cover temporal physics.'

'Oh yeah, that's right,' Yattaran said disparagingly. 'It was about rocks.'

'The only thing harder than his head,' Bob added, his big goofy voice eliciting a laugh from around the table.

'Yeah yeah,' I groused. 'You're all so fuckin' funny.' I glanced sideways at Kei, who sat looking at me curiously. Lord knows what she was thinking about _Arcadia's_ scary pirate crew now. 'My mother insisted I get an education,' I stated archly. I shot another death-stare at Yattaran, waited a beat for his face to melt, and when it didn't I added, pointedly, 'and it wasn't just about rocks.'

'For fuck's sake,' Baptiste said, slamming a hand down on the table and making half of us jump. 'Will you two get over yourselves? This is serious. We're at war with the Coalition and we don't even know why or what for.' He raised his right hand, the missing fingers deforming the shape of it, and we all knew what other scars he sported without having to be shown. 'I've already survived one war with those bastards, _barely,_ and I don't know if I want to fight in another one. Not if I don't even know what I'm fighting for.' His grey eyes roved angrily across the faces at the table. 'If anybody knows anything they'd better speak up. _Now.'_

That shut us up. Baptiste was right – this was serious. We were either going to end up alive or dead. But if we ended up alive… Harlock was going to give us paradise. The promise of starting the universe over was the only thing keeping all of us going, and I, for one, was counting on going back to before all this began. Before I made the mistakes that I did. Before I ended up on that chunk of rock with all my insides on the outside. And there were other things, best not mentioned, that I needed those oscillators to erase.

Yattaran shook his head. 'I know as much as the rest of you. I've run some calculations for Captain, but it was only spatial mechanics. I don't know what the oscillators do, not exactly. They're spatial disruptors, but how that affects the temporality of the universe is anybody's guess.' He shrugged. 'Plant them on the nodes and detonate them all at once and _bang,_ Captain says we disrupt the flow of time and reset the universe.'

'But us?' Baptiste said, giving voice to what had been keeping all of us awake at night. 'What happens to _us?'_

'We start again.'

We all turned to look at Kei in surprise. Until now she'd sat silently, toying with her food and studying the men's faces with her huge, watchful eyes. 'I believe the captain,' she said, turning those beautiful blue eyes to meet my own. 'I trust him.'

'Kei…' How to explain to her that sometimes trust wasn't enough? I closed my mouth when I saw the hope in her eyes and bit down on my words. Maybe it was better to let her find out about life the hard way, the way the rest of us had had to.

'The girl's right,' Roy said, stirring from his contemplation of Varro's stew. He looked around the table. 'We have to trust the captain. He's brought us this far, hasn't he?'

'Aye,' said Bob.

'Aye,' said Santo.

I looked at the faces of the crew as the chorus of 'ayes' mounted around me and turned to meet Yattaran's gaze. 'Then we're agreed?'

Yattaran looked at me, all traces of animosity gone from the chubby, unshaven face. We were friends again – at least until bath-time. 'Aye,' he said, with a decisive nod.

I looked across the table at Baptiste. 'Ranger?'

He studied me with his cool, grey eyes. 'Aye,' he said at last.

'Then we're agreed – we follow through with Captain's plan.' I rose from my chair and looked hard at everybody. 'And nobody says nothing.'

The lights flickered, failed completely for a moment, and then bathed us again in sudden neon brightness.

'That's funny,' Bob said, balancing his bulk on two chair legs and leaning back to stare up at the ceiling. 'Must be a glitch in the circuits.'

'There's nothing wrong with the circuits.' Yattaran picked up his plate and moved to the servery. 'It's this damn ship, letting us know it's listening.'


	6. Part 6

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part six)**

* * *

In-between planting oscillators we attended to Harlock's latest hobby – the raping and pillaging of the Coalition.

Well, technically there wasn't any raping – unless you counted reaming Coalition ships with _Arcadia's_ bony prow as rape. Which, depending on which end you were at during the process, it may have been. Harlock always took the helm when we encountered a Coalition ship. He seemed to enjoy being the one who was personally doing the reaming. He'd thrown down the gauntlet, but maybe he hadn't reckoned on Isora so quickly taking up the challenge.

The Coalition had upped their game and improved their networks in the outworlds – if we stayed too long in a sector a Coalition cruiser seemed to never be far behind. If Yattaran was right, they were tracking us by _Arcadia's_ dark matter signature. But it was also clear they'd thrown a net over the inhabited planets, which made landfall a hell of a lot less fun. When you found yourself glaring at old-timers who squinted at you for just a beat too long, or you were rejecting the advances of a pretty lady because she might have been paid to stick a shiv in you the minute you got your pants down, landfall suddenly became a lot less interesting.

Even Harlock stopped going planetside. I studied him in the quiet times, trying to fathom if he was unwell, but that was ridiculous. Nobody got sick on _Arcadia._ Whatever malaise had hold of him, it wasn't physical.

Maybe it was the toll of the years. Maybe he was afraid the Coalition might catch up with him on one of those dead-end backwaters. Or maybe he was tired, after all this time, of planting oscillators.

* * *

Deploying the oscillators became a volunteer job. Not that any of us shirked the responsibility, but the closer we came to Sol, and the closer we came to Gaia, the more dangerous it became. I never put my hand up anymore – I'd deployed about forty of the things over the years and I figured I'd done my share. And besides, I reckoned the junior crew needed to earn their chops. But when we settled into orbit around Vanda and Kei stuck her hand up, I found my own hand snaking into the air and a wilful grin struggling to plaster itself stupidly across my face as I followed her to the hangar deck.

Vanda hung like an emerald around a star so hot we'd had to lower the blast shields for transit, opening them only when we had enough atmosphere between us and the white-hot sun that burned down on the planet. From a dozen kilometres above the surface Vanda was as monotonous as all shit – it had no seas, no lakes, no deserts, not a scrap of bare land and not a rock in sight. The planet was covered completely with jungle, broken only by the meandering of narrow streams that glinted silver in the sun as Kei wheeled the module above them. The girl had taken to piloting the same way she'd taken to everything else – fast and well. She was too smart for her own good. Too smart, too beautiful, and too hung up on the captain.

I pressed my fingers to the console and brought up the outside readings. 'Surface temp thirty-eight cee,' I announced, 'humidity ninety-six percent.' I glanced out the forward port. 'No wonder the planet is covered in goddamn weeds – perfect environment for it. Problem is, not such a perfect environment for yours truly. I can't stand the heat.'

'You'll have to take that ugly sweater off, then,' Kei smirked.

'S'not ugly. I bought it from a little old lady on Chardon. She was all alone in the middle of that shithole, scraping a living the best way she knew how. Knitted it with her own two hands, she did. With her poor, old, gnarled, arthritic hands.'

Kei's eyes swept guiltily across the sweater. 'Ari, I – '

'S'alright. Clothes have sad stories too, you know.' I leaned back in the seat and ran my hands along my thighs. 'But not these babies. These are my happy pants – I got 'em from a munitions dealer on Phaeton. He was starting a new line in combat gear.' I pinched at the fabric. 'They're made of the only material strong enough to keep this fine body contained and under control. Practically blaster-proof and guaranteed not to split when bending over.'

She laughed, her gaze travelling with amusement across my thighs, the muscles nicely defined beneath the taught stretch of the pants. Oh yes, these were _very_ happy pants.

'And,' I said, watching the movements of those beautiful blue eyes, 'they got me into the sack with the old lady's daughter.'

Her eyes locked on mine and narrowed with suspicion. 'I thought you said the old lady was all alone?'

'Did I?' I grinned.

'Lying bastard.' She sounded quite disgusted with me.

'Charming. And here I was, thinking you were a lady.' I turned my attention back to the scanner, not giving her a chance to protest her lack of gentility. 'Node at 13 98 12, mark, and thanks to the ridiculous O₂ levels there are no lifeforms other than the plants. We'll need the rebreathers when we disembark.' Oxygen was great for the skin, but not so good for the lungs. A mouthful of that and our mucous membranes would die, frying. Which is probably what happened to the exploration crew that discovered Vanda way back in the first diaspora. They charted it, they named it, and they never came back from it.

'Vegetation sits on a lithosphere of igneous rock,' I continued, 'and the planetary core is geologically inert. Probably has been for millennia.' I looked out of the viewport again, my eyes blinded by that endless sea of green. 'No volcanoes no earthquakes no nothin' – no wonder this place so damn boring.'

'Huh,' she said. 'Geology really is your thing.'

'No secret there, darlin'. Rocks are predictable, formed from defined and measurable processes. Plants are like people – once you have life, you have unpredictability. I don't like unpredictability.'

'Then you're not going to like this,' she said, indicating a circle of bare earth looming ahead of us.

I squinted through the glare. 'What the hell…?' On a world where every spare scrap of land was crawling with plants, a perfectly round circle of nothing was more than a little odd.

'It's the node,' she said.

'You're kidding, right?' In all these years I'd never seen a node affect vegetation adversely, or any kind of life for that matter. Usually the nodes attracted life, the magnetic resonance of their fields proving irresistible to plants and animals alike. Who knows – maybe they formed life. Maybe they were the creator spark, seeding life throughout the universe. I put the question on my list of things to ask Miimé the next time we rubbed ankles beneath the table.

I settled back in my seat as Kei prepared the module for descent, surreptitiously testing the tightness of the restraints. One thing to be said for Kei's piloting, she was a lot more sedate than the captain. I'd barely felt a niggle of nausea the entire flight. Now all we had to get through was the landing.

She must have read my mind. Either that, or she saw my hands clenching whitely into fists. 'You're looking a little pale there. Nervous?'

'What? Me? Nervous? Noooo. Maybe.'

'Then you'd better close your eyes so you don't see it coming.'

'Good try, but I'm supposed to be watching what you're doing. You're still on probation, remember. Besides,' I said, pointedly ignoring what she was doing and staring up at what sky I could see through the viewport, 'when Death comes calling I plan to meet him with both eyes open.'

She snorted at me, a bad habit she was picking up from the men. 'Where the hell did that come from?'

'Dunno,' I shrugged. 'Was just a thought. Last time I met Death I blinked. I won't be doing that again.'

Her eyes slid sideways to look at me, but I didn't turn to meet them. Didn't feel like looking into those perfect blue jewels and losing my way in thoughts best left unexplored. So I stared instead at the sky and said 'Kei,' after the module touched gently down on solid ground, 'look at that.'

'At what?'

'The sky.'

She paused halfway through the shutdown and stared up at the high arch of the atmosphere. It was flawless. Smooth and cloudless and infinite. Skies like that… you could imagine there was nothing else in the universe but you and sky.

'Would you say that was blue?' I asked.

'Not quite.' She didn't even have to think about it.

I exhaled my disappointment out through my nose and turned away from the traitorous sky, wiped my sweaty hands on my lucky pants before putting my gloves on. One day, maybe.

We unbuckled ourselves and Kei moved to retrieve the deployment case from the rear of the cockpit. I pulled a pair of rebreathers out from the stores and handed her one, waited till she had it secured over her head and tested the seals before I secured my own and keyed open the hatch, grimacing as a blast of hot air rushed into the module, thick with humidity and making the sweat prick out beneath my sweater. Maybe I should've taken it off, but I wasn't sure Kei would survive the sight of my bulging biceps. I could feel my muttonchops wilting beneath the rebreather as I clambered down the ladder to the oscillator proper, Kei following close behind me and oblivious to the sacrifice I was making for her. She was awkward with the case in one hand and the other gripped tight on the ladder, but I wasn't going to help her – she would be doing this a lot and she had to get used to it. I didn't even turn to check as her feet hit the deck. I was already at the rail, staring curiously out at the dark tangle of jungle that ringed the node. It seemed nothing would grow in this patch of dirt – not even a weed had dared to tendril its way into the wide circle of nothing.

Too much oxygen meant no life other than the trees – there were no animal sounds, no insect sounds, just the faint whispering rustle of leaf against leaf and the occasional crack of a branch breaking beneath an overgrowth of vine. We were surrounded by it, by that eerie almost-silence, by that dark impenetrable jungle, by the ring of deep green trees that circled the clearing. The heat was stifling as I stared out, the humidity as thick and soft as soup, and I had the inexplicable feeling that the plants were alive with some kind of malignant energy and were, somehow and for some unfathomable reason, consciously avoiding the node. In the deadening silence I had the sudden feeling we were being watched, and I found myself squinting intently into the leaves and vines.

'Captain should have come,' Kei said suddenly from beside me and making me jump. 'He likes plants.'

'You think?' I replied with my eyes still glued to the jungle. 'He has a beaker half-full of dirt in his quarters but I never once saw anything green growing out of it. Maybe you should take him back a flower.' Maybe I sneered that last bit, because when I turned to look at her she was gaping at me a little taken aback.

'Look,' I said, 'what I meant was – '

'I know what you meant,' she huffed, stalking back across the deck to the oscillator console.

See? Unpredictable.

'C'mon...' I followed in the wake of her huff, came up close behind her and hovered a placatory hand over her shoulder, not knowing if I should try to touch her or not.

'Piss off,' she said, solving that little dilemma.

My hand fell to my side, then crawled back up to my belt and the pistol sitting snug in its holster. I flicked the safety off and stared over the top of Kei's head and back into the jungle. 'There's something out there,' I said, 'watching us.'

She glanced out into the overgrowth. 'There's nothing out there but trees. You scanned for life from the module, remember.'

'Nothin' wrong with my memory.' I stepped out from behind her and moved to the rail. 'But if there's nothing out there but plants, how come every hair on my body is standing up on end?'

'Poor hygiene, probably. Or space madness. Been out on the rim too long.' She came to stand beside me, a smirk on her lovely lips and her eyes looking up at me with guileless amusement. She often looked at me like that, but there were times I wished she'd look at me the way she looked at the captain. Hell, I bet half the crew wished she'd look at them the way she looked at the captain.

'I'm serious,' I said, my eyes back on the trees. It seemed to me something was moving out there, separating itself from the jungle vines and peering intently at us with large, dark eyes.

'Look,' I hissed, the pistol suddenly out of its holster and aimed into the undergrowth. 'There. Just there!'

'What?' she said, turning. 'Where?'

'There!' I ran sideways across the deck to get a better look, but whatever it was, it was gone. 'Did you see it?'

She shook her head at me, _no._

'There was a woman.' I paced back in Kei's direction, still peering into the impenetrable tangle of green. 'There was a _woman_ out there, in the trees.'

She turned back to the jungle. 'There's nothing out there, Ari. Nothing but the trees. You said yourself – '

'I saw a woman, I tell you. She came out of the trees… hell, for a moment I thought she _was_ a tree. She had green hair and black eyes – '

'A woman with green hair…' Kei repeated disbelievingly. 'You sure it wasn't a vine you saw? Or leaves moving in the wind?'

I didn't bother glaring at her – I was too busy glaring at the jungle. 'I know what I saw, Kei.' And I didn't like it. My pistol was still aimed into the trees, waiting for that malevolent face to launch itself at us at any moment. I suddenly wondered if there might have been another reason the exploration crew never came back from Vanda. 'Are we done here?'

'We're done,' she said, 'but Ari – '

I grabbed hold of her arm and aimed her towards the ladder. 'Then let's get the hell out of here.'

* * *

'Gunner command,' Yattaran bellowed down at the lower bridge. 'Prepare for engagement!'

'Aye aye,' I bellowed back.

The first mate's voice echoed down again. 'Target acquired in MX system at 384-97. No ident signal, but size parameter indicates mid-range cargo runner.'

'Aye aye,' I said again, because I liked saying it. I glanced at Dan beside me and shot him a grin. We'd been concentrating our efforts on taking out Coalition targets, but in the interest of raining hell down on the inner systems we occasionally targeted freighters and runners, just to keep the galaxy on its toes. It also kept us on our toes and provided us with some much-appreciated target practice.

Kei's voice floated down from the upper command. 'Prepare for in-skip!' she hollered. She was an angel to look at and a pushover at poker, but when she put her boots on she became, quite literally, hell on wheels.

I braced both hands on the console and leaned into it. It would be a small jump to bring us within firing range of the cargo runner, but the small jumps were the worst. Long jumps gave you time to breathe into it. Small jumps were a jolt to the system – you were out of it the minute you were into it, your body still tingling with the rush of the dark matter before you had a moment to realise it was gone.

'Captain at the helm!' Yattaran announcedthe moment _Arcadia_ exploded out of in-skip.

That put us on our toes. I had the target readings already on the scopes before the dark matter cloud dispersed, and the second it cleared I glanced out the forward screens to get a visual. The runner was as non-descript as expected, small, just one defensive gun turret poking out forward of the bridge and the entire hull noticeably unmarked. Illegals of some kind – no markings, no idents, no signatures, no nothing. Smugglers no doubt, and I found myself getting interested – no telling what booty they might have had stowed on board.

The runner wheeled broadside to us, the turret spinning its guns in our direction.

'Oops,' I said to Dan beside me. I hovered my hand over the firing command. 'Spotted us. The question is… are they going to be stupid enough to fire first?'

'Target powering up for in-skip,' Yattaran boomed.

Shit. They weren't fighting, they were running. But they were still out of ramming range, so if Captain wanted to keep the runner where it was we needed to act now.

'Orders, Captain!' I shouted over my shoulder.

Harlock spun the wheel violently with one hand, brought _Arcadia_ hard about and gave the runner's captain a good look at all our batteries. 'Take out the engines,' he said.

'Aye, sir!' One thing I'd discovered during my time on _Arcadia_ was that I really enjoyed blowing things up. Ah, hell, who was I fooling – I'd always enjoyed blowing things up. Explosives had been a big part of my life even before _Arcadia_ , back when I was working with rocks and ores and blowing up planets to plunder them of their treasures. A smile crooked my lips and I hoped nobody was watching me, finger on the trigger and grinning maniacally to myself. Right now I had a ship to disable, and given the tiny target and the speed at which _Arcadia_ was moving, it had to be done with finesse. We didn't want a replay of the _Argus_ incident.

'Ari!' Yattaran bellowed from the upper command. 'Move your arse, they're skipping out!'

'Yeah yeah,' I murmured into the sighting scope, 'hold your horses.'

The powering-up of the runner's in-skip generator registered nicely on the infra-red, and it was the work of seconds to lock the guns on that beautiful white-hot target. I was cutting it close, but I wanted the captain of that tug to think he'd got away with it, to have escape in his grasp just before I yanked it out of his fingers.

I fired the guns, looked up from the scopes to watch in real-time as _Arcadia's_ forward turret sent a stream of fire lancing across the distance between us to slice through the engine ports of the target. The runner shuddered under the impact, listing sideways as debris erupted explosively from her rear-quarters. I leaned into the scope again and fired a short burst to take out the gun turret, just in case anybody on board got the ridiculous idea into their head to try and fight back.

'Target disabled, Captain,' I said, turning a satisfied grin on the upper command. Harlock nodded his approval and relinquished the wheel.

I turned to Yattaran and smirked. _Smart arse,_ he mouthed, then said out loud, 'Captain wants you to lead the boarding party.'

That wiped the smirk from my face. I turned to Dan beside me. 'Take over here, will you.' I glanced out at the listing runner, flames bursting fitfully from the wounds I'd cut into her. 'They won't be giving any trouble, but keep your eyes peeled just in case.'

He nodded, clapping a hand against my shoulder as I turned to leave. 'Nice shooting, Ari. But…'

I turned to look at him, one eyebrow raised. 'But what?'

He grinned stupidly at me, scratching with one hand at the back of his head. 'What's a horse?'

* * *

Ten of us were lined up at the board, fully armoured and waiting for _Arcadia_ to come alongside the runner so we could deploy the boarding tubes. We didn't expect much resistance from the runner's crew – they would be armed no doubt, and given the location the runner was working those weapons could be anything from black-market Coalition issue to contraband experimentals from the factories on Janja and Crixus. And some of those were nasty – I'd once seen a hand-held melt a man nearly in half. And then there were the rumours that regularly worked their way around the rim, about frequency weapons that scrambled your insides so bad that you literally shit yourself out.

Thanks to our armour we wouldn't have to worry about that – the body-suits were impervious to ultrasonics, subsonics and microsonics, and to most configurations of assault weapons physical or otherwise. The suits weren't a hundred-percent foolproof, nothing was, but they were so close to perfect it was difficult for the crew to not get cocky and take stupid risks in the heat of engagement. Or maybe that was just their personalities – most of them were risk-takers by nature, and yes, sometimes that included me.

Kei positioned herself beside me as we waited, her armour clean and shiny and undented since it was still relatively new. We'd had to get a suit manufactured specifically for her since she was too, errr, curvaceous for any of the standard suits we had in store, and of course it had to be different, some idiot feminising it in all the obvious places. I didn't agree with the final design since I felt it made her a soft target in combat and I'd told the captain so, but he'd just shrugged at me using the universal language that all men understand and which clearly meant he was as helpless as the rest of us when it came to the fairer sex. In that way, at least, he was still reassuringly human.

I watched as Kei checked her weapon, her confidence apparent in every smooth move she made.

'Listen,' I said to her, 'stick with the pack and don't take any chances. We have no idea what might be waiting for us over there.'

We'd pinged them with a scan but the runner was tight – we couldn't get a single reading. That was par for the course for illegals these days – they didn't want anybody looking in, for all the obvious reasons, and had their hulls sealed tight with EM shields and signal scramblers. Nobody ever bothered to crack the shielding anymore – the minute somebody did, the technology was improved and you had to crack it all over again. _Arcadia_ was fitted with much the same thing. We didn't want the Coalition knowing how many – or, more to the point, how few – crew we were carrying.

'Yes sir,' Kei said. 'You don't have to worry about me.'

 _I do worry about you,_ I wanted to say, but the console sounded to let us know we were in boarding range of the runner.

'One minute,' I called through the comms. 'Stand by for tube deployment.'

'Hey, Ari,' Santo said as he took up his position and disengaged the safety on his weapon. 'Let me know if you see any women with green hair when we get on board this shitheap.'

'Oh yeah, Ari likes 'em with green hair,' Roy chimed in.

'Green, blue, so long as they _got_ hair,' Bob added.

'That's right,' Carlos laughed, a ridiculous high-pitched giggle that sent feedback whistling into my ear. 'Our boy here takes strange to a whole other level. Remember the time he – '

'Can it,' I growled through the comms. 'Thirty seconds.'

'Whassamadda Professor? Can't you remember either?'

Truth was, I couldn't remember. I'd had to take their word for it, but that didn't mean I had to keep on hearing about it. I turned a glare on Kei, which, given we were fully suited, she couldn't see. Hopefully the glare extended to my voice. 'Did you have to?'

The words that came back through the comms were hardly full of remorse and, if I wasn't reading too much into them, were tinged with amusement. She might have even been laughing. 'Sorry, Ari, but Yattaran wanted a report.'

'So you gave him one. Thanks.'

'I said I was sorry – '

'Save it.' It was an open comm, with everybody listening in, and I wasn't going to give any of them the satisfaction of listening to me whining about what had happened down on Vanda. I'd seen what I'd seen and that was the end of it. Besides, Vanda was a thousand light years behind us and I'd never have to set foot on that steaming pea-soup planet ever again. Better yet, I'd never have to see those big black eyes staring at me through the trees…even if sometimes they still stared at me in my dreams.

'Five seconds.' I cast an eye along the line then slammed my hand on the panel. There was a muted thud through our feet as the boarding tubes exploded out of their housings and buried themselves into the side of the runner. I waited at the panel, watching for the seals to activate and the pressure readings to green-light. The split-second they did… 'Go!' I shouted. 'Go go go!'

Bob whooped with glee as he vaulted into the nearest tube. He was always first pick for boarding parties – he was gifted with a gun and his enormous bulk intimidated the enemy, but it was his sheer childish enthusiasm that made him so useful. Nothing fazed him – he was literally unstoppable once he got going.

I waited as the crew disappeared one by one down the tubes, my ears on the chatter piping through the comms as they emerged into the runner. The increase in chatter was to be expected, along with the grunts of exertion as the men engaged in close-quarters combat. What wasn't expected was Bob's whooping turning to bellowing. I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but he sounded angry. Right royally fucked off, in fact.

'Bob,' I shouted over the comms, trying to be heard over the babble of voices that filled my ears. 'Bob!' I shouted again, 'report!'

'Ari!' Roy's voice singled itself out from the noise. 'It's the goddamned Coalition. Get some backup over here, now!'

I stared into the nearest tube, blood turning to ice in my veins. 'First mate,' I said calmly into the comms. Maybe too calmly. 'You get that?'

'Roger,' Yattaran replied, a lot less calmly. 'Backup team on their way.'

I didn't reply. I was already in the tube and sprinting towards the sound of combat that came from the far end. Ahead I could see the sparking of blaster fire, a confusion of shadow and light that resolved itself into explosive sound as I barrelled out of the tube and right into the middle of it, weapons fire slamming into my armour and sending me staggering before I could bring the repeater to bear. On my left was the _Arcadia_ team – still standing, thankfully – and on my right, a troop of Coalition Special Ops. I didn't have time to wonder what Ops were doing on an unmarked illegal runner, or what they were doing in the MX sector in the first place. I only had time to register that three of them were down and that the rest of them seemed to be very good at what they were doing.

'Ari! Get the hell in line!' Carlos aimed some covering fire in my direction, giving me a chance to inch my way back, weapon blazing, towards the crew.

'Backup's on its way,' I said as the ranks closed in around me. 'What the hell are Ops doing here?'

'Who the hell knows,' Roy's voice panted through the internal comms. He was firing his repeater in rapid succession and keeping the Ops on their toes. 'Suggest we retreat to _Arcadia_ and blow the fuckers into chunks.'

'Not until we know what they're doing out here.' I was firing my repeater as rapidly as Roy was in my attempt to score a fatal hit. The Ops were armoured but there were chinks we could take advantage of. The joints were particularly vulnerable – the neck, the shoulders, the groin – but the problem was getting a targeted blast into those chinks. The Ops were in constant motion, as were we. And there was another problem we were having – when you were as pissed off as we were you didn't always shoot straight.

'And you said this was gonna be easy,' Bob groused, his voice thick with exertion. He took a hit mid-chest, grunting as he staggered back a step.

'It was _supposed_ to be easy,' I growled back at him. We'd been expecting a quivering surrender, and instead we'd found ourselves fighting for our lives. I turned my gun on Bob's assailant, caught him square on the faceplate of his helmet and knocked him back off his feet. I edged my way forward as the Op hauled himself dazedly to his knees, aimed the repeater at his neck and smiled grimly to myself as the blaster fire arced hot into the soft spot and put him out for the count. That, at least, had been easy.

'C'mon,' I puffed into the comms, 'you all know how this works. Aim for the joints in their armour and don't let up. Backup will be here any minute and then we'll put these bastards down like the dogs they are.'

Grunts of enthusiasm filled the comms, accompanied by a renewed round of fire that drove the Ops back on their heels, some of them diving for cover against the wall or on the deck, some of them falling to the floor and staying there. I merged back into the line as we pushed our way forward, glancing around for Kei's gold armour. 'Kei,' I barked into the comms.

'Here,' she replied. 'Watching your backs.'

I glanced back to see Kei positioned in the rear. Good. She could stay there.

'Never mind _our_ backs, girl. Stay on your toes and don't give them a chance to – '

 _Shit._

A blast of enemy fire slammed into the side of my neck while my head was turned, a magnetic round that sent a spark worming its way into the armour and shorting out the data connection between the helmet and the suit's CPU. It was a lucky shot, a goddamned fucking unbelievably lucky shot that caught me when my back was turned, knocked me off balance and sent me crashing to my knees as the suit's systems cascaded into irretrievable failure right before my unbelieving eyes.

First law of combat: never turn your back on the enemy. And here I was, with my back turned and my pants down. Literally. The armour's emergency relays kicked in as it sparked out around me, but all that did was disengage the seals and retract the helmet so I wouldn't suffocate. Unfortunately this left my handsome face exposed to the air and blinking stupidly at the blaster fire that was exploding way too close to my head.

'Shit,' I squeaked out, hurling myself sideways as a blast winged past me in a blaze of yellow flame. I felt fire against my cheek, heard a muttonchop sizzle with an audible hiss, grimaced as the smell of burning hair filled my nostrils. 'Goddamn fuck,' I growled, crawling to my knees and attempting sluggishly to stand.

'Ari!' Carlos activated his external speakers and bellowed at me. 'Keep your stupid head down and get behind us.'

Easier said than done. With the systems offline the armour moved like lead-weight and I couldn't duck and run forever. I was barely on my feet when a round hit me in the back and sent me crashing face-down to the floor. _'Fuck,'_ I spat again, hauling myself laboriously to my knees. I was breaking out in sweat by the time I made it back to my feet, but managed to somehow turn around and bring the repeater to bear.

'Down,' I grinned maliciously as two of the Ops fell heavily to their backs, 'but not out.' I fired another round, staggered off-balance as a burst of return fire slammed into my chest and felled me once more to the floor.

'You moron,' Santo said. 'Get up and get the fuck behind us!'

I lifted hand in defeat and let it fall with a clunk to the floor. Without power the suit was an unresponsive dead-weight of metal and circuits and servos.

'Get up, dickhead,' Bob said, kicking at me with one foot and then heaving me to my feet with one hand.

'Thanks,' I grunted as he steadied me on the deck and positioned himself between me and the enemy. 'Remind me never to – '

'Ari!'

There was an explosion of yellow, a hail of fire that slammed into the front of Bob's suit and arced off it, around it, stinging my eyes with sparks that made me blink and squint blindly. The bursts impacted hard against Bob's armour, a metallic thunking that staggered him backward, his legs tensing as he braced himself against it. But even Bob's great tree-trunk of a body couldn't sustain an onslaught like that – he pitched backward, his body catching me and spinning me sideways. Over the falling of his shoulder I glimpsed one of the Coalition Ops, separated from the pack and with the barrel of his weapon aimed straight at my face.

'Ari!'

The cry came again, but I couldn't register what it was over the roaring of the blood in my ears and the sound of blaster fire bursting around me. I couldn't move, couldn't duck, could only watch helpless as Bob dragged me down in slow-motion and the finger of the Op in front of him squeezed down slowly on the trigger.

 _Ah…shit._

I crashed to the floor beneath Bob's weight, throwing up a futile hand as he rolled grunting off me and a flame of yellow coiled in slow-motion from the barrel of the Op's weapon and exploded in my direction. I heard my name again, what sounded like a chorus of voices that were muffled and far away, shouts that were stretched out the same way that Time had stretched itself out. I narrowed my eyes out as the tongue of flame curled inexorably towards me, braced myself, held my breath against the inevitable and wondered if the dark matter would be able to reconstruct a head that had been exploded by a pulse weapon… assuming there was enough head left to be scraped up off the deck.

'Ari!' Another voice, a clear ringing bell like the singing of an angel. 'Get up, old man,' the angel said as she manifested out of thin air, shining like liquid gold in the glare of the overhead lights and eclipsing the blaster fire in a bright halo of yellow.

'Kei.' I squinted at the vision, half-blinded by the afterburn of my near miss. 'Thank Christ.' Beyond the armoured gold of her legs I watched the Op crash hard to the floor, weapon clattering from his hand and spinning across the floor. My head fell back against the hard metal of the deck. 'I owe you.'

'Get up,' she said, her back turned to me as she concentrated fire on the enemy.

I stared at the ceiling, grateful that my head was still intact.

'I said get _up,'_ she barked. And then she added, pithily, 'stick with the pack, you said.'

I raised my head and squinted at her. Was she giving me a serve? _Now?_

'Don't take any chances, you said.'

I rolled agonisingly to my knees. 'Damn, girl, I know what I said. Where the hell's the backup?'

'We're here,' the Ranger said, before Kei could tell me not to call her 'girl.' 'We arrived when you and Bob were getting cosy on the floor.'

'Funny.' I staggered to my feet, stood swaying as the line formed around me and the crew concentrated fire on the Ops. 'Do me a favour,' I said, licking my lips and tasting sweat, 'and put these fuckers out of their misery.'

* * *

'Jesus,' Yattaran said, surveying the scorch-marks on the side of my face. I waited a beat for a follow-up remark, something along the lines of his usual snideness, but his mouth stayed closed as he hiked his glasses higher up on his face and turned to look at the captain. 'We'll need to sort out the bugs in the suits.' He seemed genuinely concerned, but I doubted his concern was a result of my near-death experience. Yattaran wore one of those suits, too, and he had a lot more face to target.

'Aristotle,' Harlock said from the shadowed depths of his throne, his eye gathering the dim illumination of the bridge and reflecting it back at me as a single point of light. 'Report.'

'All hands returned safely,' I said. 'No casualties. Well, except for this.' I raised a hand to my ruined muttonchop, the burn beneath it stinging like buggery and making me suck in a breath. It hurt like hell, and I still had the retina burn throwing spots before my eyes. 'Fortunately the backup crew arrived in time to save us from having our arses well and truly whupped.' I probed my face again, the skin hot to the touch and the hair scorched to stubble. I hoped the dark matter would kick in soon, because I couldn't seem to keep my hands off it.

'The Ops were good,' I continued, wincing as the wound twitched beneath my fingers. 'Too good. Better than the usual run-of-the-mill combat troop. We'll need to lift our game if this is the sort of scenario we're going to start finding ourselves in.'

Harlock's lips tightened in the dim light.

'The question is,' Yattaran said, 'why was a ship full of Coalition troops this far out in the sector, disguised as a cargo runner?'

I shook my head. 'That I don't know. They weren't expecting us and we weren't expecting them. But I know one thing for sure – we weren't meant to find them.' I looked hard at the captain. _'Nobody_ was meant to find them.'

He studied me silently, with a deep, unnatural stillness. 'What was their last recorded port of call?' he asked finally.

'Heavy Meldar,' I said.

'Heavy Meldar?' Yattaran looked from me to Harlock and back again. 'What the hell would they be doing on Heavy Meldar?'

'Beats me. They had no cargo, no goods or chattel of any kind. Just an unmarked ship loaded to the gills with Ops.'

'What the hell,' Yattaran said again, shaking his head as if he were trying to unravel the biggest mystery of the universe.

Truth be told I was just as disturbed – Heavy Meldar was the scum-hole of the universe. The waiting room of death, Maji had opined the last time we docked in the high pale space of its upper atmosphere. The place men went when they'd had enough of life and of the vast dead and dying galaxy, where they could sit and drink and wait sullenly for their fate. More importantly for us, Heavy Meldar was one of the few free worlds left in the sector. If the Coalition had established a presence there…

'Aristotle.' Harlock's head tilted back against his chair, his hair falling away and revealing the whole of his face. He looked pale in the dim light, the scar livid where it tracked along his cheek. 'Were you able to access the logs?'

'Yes, sir.' I retrieved the chip from my pocket and fingered it slowly. 'Recommend we steer clear of Heavy Meldar for a while. Until we find out what the Coalition were doing there.'

Harlock held out a hand for the chip, made me haul my tired body across the deck to give it to him. He sat for a moment, looking at it as if it might burn a hole through his fingers. Then he stood and left the bridge.


	7. Part 7

**The Aristotle Transposition**

 **(part seven)**

* * *

I lowered the datapad, since Harlock didn't seem interested in status reports, and tapped it absently against my thigh as we walked.

'There's a heat bleed in the port exhaust,' I said, not yet willing to give up my report and the neat little graphs I'd spent the morning colour-coding. 'It's marginal, but we'd better – '

Harlock held out a hand for the pad and I handed it over, watched as his eye tracked across the screen. He handed the pad back, saying nothing about the pretty graphs. 'I'll take care of it.'

'Captain,' I said, my fingers closing reflexively around the device as he deposited back into my care. 'Short of crawling into – '

'Aristotle.'

I shut my mouth and glanced back at Miimé, floating a few steps behind as we paced the darkened corridors, and she smiled at me. A Cheshire Cat grin that made the blood rush burning to my face. I looked away before I could embarrass myself, glancing briefly at the location marker posted on the junction wall. Level sixteen, aft. I'd only been here before in passing, and even that was a long time ago. The science area was off-limits and we all of us respected the captain's wishes. There were plenty of other ways to get where we needed to go.

But not, apparently, today.

'I think Kei is ready for command,' Harlock said, out of nowhere.

I walked in silence beside him, watched as the lights flickered on in the corridor ahead of us.

'You don't think that's a good idea,' he said as the lights behind us faded to darkness.

I sucked in a breath, weighing my words. 'She's young. And she hasn't been with us very long. Not as long as some of the others.'

'And she's a woman.'

'A girl,' I corrected. 'At least, that's how the men think of her.'

He glanced sideways at me. 'Is that how you think of her?'

I shook my head. 'Not anymore.'

'You don't think the men will accept her command?'

I shrugged. I really didn't know.

He turned his gaze downwards, paced along in silence.

'Yattaran,' he said to the floor, 'will object.'

I laughed, a quiet snort at the thought of Yattaran's face when Harlock delivered the news.

'Kei's good,' I said. 'She's quick and she's smart.' And ridiculously beautiful. 'Better than most of them. First Mate will just have to deal.'

Harlock exhaled in that quiet way he had, a subtle sound that could express anything from agreement to disagreement, or from amusement to scorn and back again. The expression was situation-dependent, and it had taken me a lot of years to work my way through the myriad of meanings. 'He won't have to deal for long,' he said. 'There are only nine more oscillators to deploy.'

'About that,' I said. 'Suggest we delay the deployment on Tokarga. Permission to remind the captain that we'd have to pass through the MX sector and the Coalition might still be patrolling the area.'

'I haven't forgotten,' he said.

'Yeah. Seemed like you had.'

He didn't answer, his hands disappearing beneath his cloak as he settled it closer around him. Ahead of us the lights flickered on, illuminating the pressed metal floor, the dull grey walls, the door to the science lab with its multiple notices and warnings.

'You asked for time to find out what the Coalition were doing,' he said.

'I did.'

'And I gave you time.'

'You did.' During which Yattaran had aggressively penetrated every Coalition firewall from the MX sector to Sol and back again, and only managed to come up with a hand full of burnt fingers.

'And what did you find?'

'Nothing,' I said, 'and you know it.'

Silence. Just the sounds of our boots on the floor and the rhythmic pulse of the ship, as steady as a heartbeat.

'Maybe there was something on the datachip,' I ventured, since Harlock still hadn't returned it for analysis. 'Something on the runner's logs that was overlooked. Maybe if you gave it to Yattaran… '

He looked at me, and damn him if his lips didn't crook into an apologetic smile. 'There was nothing,' he said.

I exhaled through my nose, loudly. It wasn't possible that the Coalition could bury something deep enough that it couldn't be found, and it bugged the hell out of me.

He slowed in his steps, paused, brought his feet together and turned to face me. A hand emerged from the depths of his cloak and reached towards me, fingers resting on my shoulder. I looked up into his face. This man was my friend – over the years we had become close. Well, as close as a man can get to an island when he's adrift in a boat about a mile away from it. That's how it felt with Harlock, how it had always felt, as though I was forever drifting around him. Coming closer when the tide permitted, and alternately being dragged back out again to sea.

'Aristotle.' His fingers pressed into my shoulder. 'It's time to face fate and end the cycle.'

I looked into his eye, saw the dark matter spark into purple flame. Said, warily, 'what do you mean?'

He blinked the flame away. 'I always thought it was about Time, but now I realise it's only ever been about – '

He stopped, narrowed his good eye as the door to the lab slid abruptly open. I turned, stared into the darkened space that had opened up behind me, felt a shiver run up my spine as I wondered yet again if the ship wasn't haunted by damned ghosts, a thought that was reinforced when the laboratory lights blinked on in a sudden blaze of illumination.

'Huh,' I said, with feeling, as Harlock's hand fell from my shoulder. He moved silently around me, disappeared through the open door and left me standing in the corridor.

'Discussion over,' I muttered to myself and made as if to move away, but Miimé stepped in close behind me, blocking me with the pins and needle sting of dark matter.

'You've been invited inside,' she said, a firefly drifting from her hair and fluttering cool against my face.

'I have?' I said, raising both eyebrows and turning again to the open door. 'By whom,' I murmured, taking a step towards the lab with the expectation of the door slamming hard in my face. It wouldn't be the first time _Arcadia_ had slammed a door in my face – we were all of us used to having the skin grazed from our curious noses.

Only this time the door stayed open.

'You sure?' I asked, hesitating on the threshold with my eyes fixed suspiciously on the treacherous door. 'I thought the science lab was off-limits…'

'It is,' Miimé said from close beside me, her fingers curling soft around my arm as she steered me through the open door.

I blinked in the hard tungsten brightness, inhaled on air that was musty and stale and tainted with the ozone tang of dark matter and a hundred years of time. I looked around, curious as to why the room had been sealed for so many years, and wondering why, now, it had so inexplicably thrown itself open.

That it had been a working lab was obvious – the place was untidy, equipment scattered haphazardly over benches, datapads and dirty rags discarded randomly amongst the debris of another time. It looked lived-in, as though the owner had only recently stepped away and would shortly be returning to his work.

I walked across to the nearest bench and inspected the objects that were randomly strewn across it, watched from the corner of my eye as Harlock paced the contours of the room, his steps measured and slow, one hand on a benchtop as he trailed his fingers contemplatively along it. He stooped to retrieve some papers that had spilled to the floor and placed them carefully on the nearest worktop.

I moved to another bench, bare but for a set of schematics that was unfurled and tacked flat to its surface. I took off a glove and placed my hand on the parchment, pressed it beneath my bare fingers, leant down to smell the paper and the ink and the passage of the years. Only then did I comprehend what was drawn upon it.

' _Arcadia,'_ Miimé said from somewhere behind me. 'How _Arcadia_ was meant to be.'

I stared down at the plans, at the ship that was drawn in precise lines on the parchment. It was _Arcadia,_ of that there was no doubt, with the same grinning death's head carved bold on her prow and the sterncastle still perched anachronistically at her rear. But between those points she was different, her lines cleaner and smoother and minus the black bony edges. My fingers traced their way across the paper, stopping only at the architect's name.

'Oyama,' I said, eyebrows creasing as I dredged the recesses of my memory.

'Oyama Tochiro,' Miimé said, peering over my shoulder. 'The creator of the _Deathshadow_ fleet.' She leaned against me. _'Arcadia_ was Harlock and Tochiro's dream. When the war ended, they were going to – '

'Miimé,' Harlock said from across the room. She pulled away from me, but not so far that I couldn't still feel her through my sweater, those tiny tendrils of otherness that made my skin jump and crawl – and not in a bad way.

'Captain has too many memories,' she murmured, 'and no way to escape.'

Harlock moved towards us, came to stand on the opposite side of the bench and stared down at the plans that were stretched across them.

'When the war ended,' he said, finishing what Miimé had started, 'the dream became a nightmare.'

I looked across at him,the bitterness so strong in him I could taste it. 'What happened? To _Arcadia?_ To Oyama? Where did he go?'

Harlock looked stricken suddenly. Bereft. He lowered his head, let his hair fall across his face.

'He didn't go anywhere,' Miimé said, moving to stand beside me. 'Tochiro is still here.' She lifted a hand, set loose a drift of light that filled the room. 'He's all around us.'

I stared at her, at the gossamer of her, at the fireflies that drifted golden from her body and dissipated in the air.

She lowered her hand, smoothed it carefully across the schematics, her fingers stopping millimetres from my own, from the name 'Oyama' scribed carefully into the corner of the page. I stared down at her fingers where they rested pale next to mine, the skin smooth and pure compared to the rough and calloused texture of my own. Not for the first time I felt ashamed to be human.

'The release of the dark matter changed everything,' she sighed, and fireflies drifted again before my eyes. 'It transformed _Deathshadow_ according to Tochiro's will, but the process was contaminated with organic matter from the remains of the dead.' She looked abruptly up at Harlock. 'And the dying.'

Organic matter… That explained a lot. _Arcadia's_ ability to heal… the bony edges of her… the steady drum of the heartbeat that pulsed even now through my feet.

Miimé's hand moved away from mine, cascaded like liquid from the table. _'Arcadia_ is not how she was meant to be. She is not how Tochiro wanted her to be.'

'She's not how any of us wanted her to be,' Harlock said, his voice thick as the bitterness of the years bubbled abruptly to the surface. He leaned over the opposite side of the table, placed his hands upon it, stared down at the _Arcadia_ of his dreams. 'None of this is how we wanted it to be.' He looked up at me then, gave me a glimpse of his defeat. 'None of it.'

'Captain…' I said, started to say, then closed my mouth against the futility. What could you say to a man who had been robbed so cruelly of his dreams… and lived far too long with the consequences.

He straightened at the bench, his hands falling from the table as the emotion fell visibly from his skin. He changed before my eyes, transformed into something cold. Something unreachable. 'We're nearly at the end,' he said, from a thousand miles away. 'If the crew could trust me a little longer…'

I looked at him, at the emotionless mask of his face. Realised that after all these years I didn't really know him at all.

'It would help if we understood what you were doing,' I said. 'Resetting the universe… It's a lot to wrap our heads around.'

He nodded. He got it, but he still wasn't letting anyone in on the mystery. 'When we reach Earth,' he said, 'you'll understand.'

I stepped away from the schematics, away from the dream, away from the life that, in this universe, Harlock would never have. But maybe, when the oscillators were deployed and the universe was reset, it might once more be within his reach.

'I hope so,' I said. I slid my glove back onto my hand. Beneath my feet _Arcadia's_ heartbeat pulsed steadily, a great ticking clock in which time was running out.

* * *

I never got to see Yattaran's face when Harlock delivered the news, but he managed to deal with Kei's promotion well-enough in public. Privately he bitched like a banshee for the space of about ninety seconds, until the look on my face precipitously shut the tirade down. But he took it in good humour, grinning sheepishly when my scowl cracked smugly into a conspiratorial smile – secretly he was as sweet on her as the rest of us. And also like the rest of us, he was already used to having her bossing him around. There was something about a woman with boobs and boots that inexplicably made men roll over and say die. If I knew as much about biologicals as I did about rocks I'd write a paper about it, specifically the gender-imperative dominatrix sub-routine that squirrels away at the Y-chromosome brain, the unfortunate end result of which is a total paralysis of the frontal lobes whenever a woman in a pair of patent-leather thigh-highs enters a room.

I sat back in my chair and surveyed the room under the pretext of stretching my neck, then leaned back over the datascreen set into the table top. I was sat in a bar on Tellar, one of the more expensive bars, with – according to the sign on the wall opposite – the cleanest cathouse in the hemisphere situated conveniently just one floor above. And Tellar was all about clean. The whole fucking planet was all about clean. Too bad that beneath the nicely swept streets existed an underground of kink and contraband that was administered better than most municipal governments.

I swiped a finger across the screen, searching the vidfeeds for any mention of _Arcadia_ and the Coalition's intensifying vendetta on Harlock. I'd been rewarded twice, the most recent being a sighting of _Arcadia_ in the Nima system, which I'd had to file away in the mystery basket since we hadn't been anywhere near Nima. The other mention hit closer to home, with a grainy surveillance capture of what looked like me and Dan and Santo on a street in Helio. The image had caused my gut to twist with an emotion I wasn't used to feeling and didn't know how to translate into any kind of coherent thought. Was it shock, learning that we had been so easily tagged? Or was it dread, realising that the Coalition was closer on our heels than we thought, and that in short order my handsome mug would be on a wanted poster gracing a wall next to Harlock's.

I tapped the screen and assigned the item to the trash. I was glad mom was dead, so she never got to see what became of her golden-haired boy. Aristotle the pirate, wanted in twenty-seven sectors and soon to have his very own poster on a wall in a transit lounge near you. I took a swig from the ale that sat warming on the table, but had a hard time swallowing around a sudden swell of self-loathing. Poor mom. One son turned pirate, the other… well, the other disappeared over a decade ago on a survey mission out by Mizar. Dead or alive, there were too many light-years in the way for anybody to find out. I'd had just as many light-years to accommodate my brain to the mystery, but now and then it tugged at the old heart muscle, knowing what I know now about all the ways space has of making a man die.

I lifted the glass to my lips, swallowing forcefully around the lump in my throat as I tamped down feelings I'd put way too much time and effort into not feeling. This, I thought, is why a man should never drink alone. It brings up way too many –

I put the glass down carefully on the table and reached for the pistol holstered at my side. The conversation in the bar had hit a sudden lull and there was every possibility the authorities were about to catch up with Mrs Jones's little boy and give his mother something to really be proud of. I glanced sideways to see a group of men poised with their drinks half-way to their mouths as they stared slack-jawed towards the door, and recognised instantly the hallmark symptoms of collective frontal lobe paralysis. I snorted to myself, loosening my grip on the pistol as I followed their gaze to see Kei's bosom silhouetted majestically against the open swing-door. I beckoned her over with a flick of the head, returning my attention to the screen as those patent-leather thigh-highs confidently clickity-clicked their way across the floor.

'And what have you been doing?' she asked as she slid like a cat into the chair opposite.

'Nothin',' I grunted, swiping a hand across the screen to shut it down.

'Nothing?' she repeated, taking the half-drunk glass of ale from the table and grimacing as she downed a swallow. 'At all?'

'Well,' I said, taking the glass out of her hand and draining what was left in one long gulp. 'Apparently we were spotted a week ago out by Nima.'

She rubbed at her lips, attempting to wipe the taste of the ale away. 'But we haven't been anywhere near Nima.'

'Isn't that what I just said?'

She blinked at me. 'In your head, maybe. Although it sounds more like something's crawled up your nose. Give me a look. Show me what's up your nose.'

'Piss off.' I turned my head to stop her trying to look up my nose and banged the empty glass back onto the table. 'Get what you wanted?'

'Mostly,' she said, ignoring the bang and depositing a bag of unmentionables on top of the darkened vidscreen. I glanced at it and grunted. Girl things. I wasn't going to ask and I sincerely hoped she wasn't going to tell.

Her closed fist slid slowly across the table towards me. 'And this,' she said, opening her fingers and depositing a little bundle of shimmer on the table top.

'What's that,' I asked, squinting at it suspiciously.

'A gift,' she said. 'A thank you for all the training. For… all the… you know…' She broke off, shrugging her shoulders.

'No, girl,' I said. 'I don't know.'

A patent-leather toe made sudden contact with my shin. 'Don't be an ass, and don't call me _girl._ Just look at it.'

I smirked at the fire in her eyes, reached a finger towards the little pile and poked, pulling back as the mound of shimmer resolved itself into a burnished skull on a heavy chain. 'Is that… jewellery?'

She nodded. 'I noticed some of the other guys were, you know, wearing it.'

'You bought jewellery,' I said.

'Uh-huh.' She was positively beaming.

'For me.' I poked at the little pile with my finger.

'For Chrissakes.' She scooped the chain up and proffered it impatiently towards me. 'Aren't you going to put it on?'

I shook my head. 'No.'

'C'moooon,' she said, making the doe-eyes at me. 'Put it on.'

I can never say no to the doe-eyes. 'What the hell,' I shrugged. 'It beats a smiley-face badge any day.' I slipped the chain over my head and adjusted the skull so that it looked right at her. 'What do you think? Does it make me more manly?'

She grinned, and I grinned right back.

'I guess I should say thanks,' I said.

'I guess you should.'

'Thanks.' I fingered the little skull.

'So buy me a drink.'

I signalled to the barkeep and leaned my chair back on two legs as she looked around the room.

'Any word from Yattaran?' she asked.

'Nope.' I let the chair fall forward.

'Shouldn't he have made contact by now?'

'You're taking this promotion way too seriously,' I said. 'Yattaran is sourcing an encryption code from somebody he coyly described as an 'old friend.' I don't think he'll be checking in any time soon.'

'Oh,' she said, the roses in her cheeks flaring into sudden brilliance.

'Exactly,' I said. 'Although I prefer the much more expressive _ew.'_

Her perfect lips curled a little in disapproval. 'You're disgusting. What about Dan?'

'Old mate Dan did report in. The consumables have been secured and he's waiting for Bob and I to assist with the loading.'

'Bob!' She looked around the bar as she suddenly realised the big guy was nowhere to be seen.

'Relax. He's upstairs. Scratching an itch between the thighs of a not unattractive woman.'

'Ari!' she burst out, clapping her hands over her ears and squeezing her eyes shut.

I leaned in and took hold of both her lovely wrists. 'Darlin',' I said, taking her hands away from her ears and waiting till those baby blues popped open. 'Closing your eyes won't get the image out of your head. Believe me, I've tried.'

'Ew,' she said as the barkeep deposited the drinks on the table. 'You're right. _Ew_ is much more expressive.' She took a sip of the ale and grimaced. 'Tell me again why you make me drink this crap?'

'Because all proper pirates drink ale.'

'All proper pirates drink rum,' she corrected.

'True, but there hasn't been any real rum since Earth was sanctioned a hundred years ago.'

'Earth,' she said, with the faintest of sighs. 'Ari, do you think we'll ever really see it?' Her voice was dreamlike, as though she were asking me if I thought she'd ever see an angel.

'That's the plan.'

'But Earth…'

'Yeah. I know.' Earth was the Holy Grail. Shangri La. A place that existed only in people's imagination. Who knows if it was even really there or not.

She slid a finger through the condensation that had started to collect on her glass. 'What do you think will happen when we get there?'

I took a swig of ale and swallowed, my throat recoiling from the bitterness as it tracked down my throat. I looked at her, felt myself drowning in those big, beautiful eyes as they silently asked a question I didn't want to answer.

'Ari?'

I lowered the glass back to the table top. 'I think,' I said carefully, 'that we're all going to die.'

She stared at me, her mouth twitching just the merest of degrees.

'Think about it.' I leaned across the table to stop her from talking. 'The Earth has been sanctioned – by the Sanction. Nobody's been there for a hundred years. Everything on the inside of Mars' orbit is patrolled. Nothing and nobody gets past Mars. Nothing and nobody gets to Earth. And we're just one ship. Against who the fuck knows how many.'

'But _Arcadia_ …'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Sure. The _Arcadia_ can hold her own. If anybody knows the capability of her firepower it's me. But she's on her own, and she'll be trying to pass through the most heavily guarded sector in the galaxy. Not just the galaxy. The entire fucking universe!'

'But Ari – '

'And then,' I said, cutting her off because I was on a roll and I didn't want to listen, 'what if we make it to Earth? What if we make it through the Coalition's vanguard? We somehow get the deployment module down to the surface – through what I can only assume will be closely guarded airspace – and deploy the oscillator?'

'Ari – '

'And then what happens? Have you thought about it, Kei? Have you really thought about it?'

If she was pissed at me, she held it in magnificently. In fact the only thing I sensed in her was disappointment, because I was crushing her dream. Crushing everybody's dream.

'I don't need to think about it,' she said, her fingers tight around the glass. 'I trust the Captain.'

'I know.' I fingered the skull she'd given me, felt the metal growing warm beneath my fingers. 'Just… don't mistake love for trust.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Don't worry Kei, you're not alone. There isn't a one amongst us who doesn't love the unreachable bastard. But,' I leaned in close and looked into her eyes, 'love does not equate to trust. The two are not mutually inclusive.'

* * *

'Alright you miserable bastards,' Yattaran's voice boomed out loud across the bridge, 'oscillator 99 is waiting out there with Tokarga's name on it. Prepare for in-skip – '

'Wait.'

Yattaran paused, mouth open, shot a backwards glance at Harlock and waited quietly for the rest.

The captain's voice emerged from out of shadow. 'We need one more man.'

Yattaran sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and turned to face the captain. 'More crew?'

Harlock's fingers curled around the carved skulls that punctuated the arms of the chair. 'Just one.'

Yattaran glanced at where I stood at Kei's station and shot another look back at the captain. 'Understood,' he said, though it was clear that he didn't from the twin patches of red that had risen into the meat of his cheeks. 'Destination?'

The captain's head fell to one side and it looked like he was sleeping. Dreaming.

'Heavy Meldar,' he said.

Yattaran's eyes met mine, his displeasure writ large on his face. He nodded at me. _You heard him._

'Aye,' I barked in response, though I was just as confused as he was. 'Heavy Meldar. Coordinates locked in.' I glanced uneasily at Yattaran as he resumed his bellowing.

'Prepare for In-skip. Engage dark matter engines.'

There was a chorus of ayes from the lower command, and I glanced back at the dark matter generator that filled the space behind the captain's chair. Miime's fingers slid over the control orb as the machinery powered up, the pressure in the air increasing as the generator prepared to unleash its power. In the deep of his chair Harlock stirred and I watched, not for the first time, as the dark matter worked soft tendrils across his skin.

* * *

There was no sign of Coalition presence as we pierced the atmosphere of Heavy Meldar, _Arcadia's_ engines raising the dust from the streets and shaking the shingles from the roofs as we overshot the miserable settlements scattered haphazardly in the planet's ever-present dirt. We weren't exactly operating on stealth mode, not with all the commotion of atmospheric penetration over a resident population – not that we were ever concerned with standard planetary entry procedure. To complete the grand entry, a plume of dark matter trailed in billows behind us and was left hanging in the moistureless air – a big, black finger following in our wake and pointing all the way to the absurdly christened Gun Frontier Mountain. I stared down at the summit as it passed beneath the forward viewscreen – one of a series of massifs formed during Meldar's last volcanic hurrah, before the planet subsided into the same kind of apathy that infected its dead-end population.

I reached an arm out, clamped my fingers around the back of Eddie's neck and hauled him over to my station.

'Kid,' I said, stabbing a finger towards the scanner array, 'keep your eyes on this screen and don't look away for a second. Not one second, y'hear? Don't even blink. You see anything bigger than a bicycle coming towards us on this screen and I want to hear about it.'

He nodded mutely, shrugging out from under my grip as I turned to face the command.

'Well,' I said to Yattaran, 'the fire has well and truly been lit on the mountain. Let's see what rats crawl out of their holes this time.'

He licked his lips and grinned wetly at me. I didn't agree with the new recruitment process, but Yattaran enjoyed it thoroughly, declaring that it deterred the greedy and the lazy, and let's not forget the mercenary. But I knew it was really so the little prick had a chance to make men tremble in their boots the way men must once have made him tremble in his own.

I glanced at where the captain sat, lost in shadow. Harlock didn't care either way. His end-game was closing in, the ultimate goal that he always hinted at but never quite declared.

* * *

Four hopefuls had hauled their way to the top of the mountain, only four, and I could just imagine what must have been running through their minds when they heaved themselves panting onto the summit of the mountain and were greeted by _Arcadia's_ crew in full battle armour, the faceless masks leering and laughing as the crew poked and prodded and hauled the four roughly aboard _Arcadia's_ cargo bay.

I watched from the rear of the bay as our four potentials were lined up at gunpoint along the edge of the cargo ramp, grinning to myself as they one-by-one realised _Arcadia_ had shifted position and they discovered the couple of kilometres of empty air that stretched out beneath their feet. It was hard to not feel pity for the poor stupid bastards, their lungs still heaving from the effort of the climb and their faces pinched with the cold of the mountain and something, maybe, that approached disillusionment and fear. Unfortunately for our hopefuls, fear was what we were aiming for. The disillusionment was simply an unexpected by-product.

I swaggered my way across the deck, repeater at the ready as I leaned in close to their faces, inspecting each potential recruit and not particularly liking any of what I saw.

'Don't forget to ask if any of 'em can cook,' I said through the closed comms, stopping at the end of the line to stare into the quiet face of a kid who for some reason did not seem to be feeling the fear. I pushed my helmeted head close to his nose to try and upset his balance, but he swayed back only marginally, his pale eyes staring at the faceplate of my armour curiously. Occasionally his gaze darted beyond me, focussing on random points around the bay as if he was looking for something. Or someone. I studied him suspiciously as I fought down an urge to push him all the way off the edge of the ramp.

'If you've got a problem with the food,' Yattaran retorted as the potentials were relieved of their arms, the weapons dropped spinning out into the air, 'learn to cook yourself.'

'Do it, Ari,' Santo cut in. 'With that pretty face you'd make me the perfect wife.'

'Prettiest face on the ship,' I agreed, turning away from the inquisitive eyes of the kid and still struggling with the overwhelming urge to send him hurtling into space.

'Which makes me what?' Kei said. She was stationed to the rear, to the left of the big-arse chair Yattaran had positioned ceremonially in the centre of the deck and ostentatiously lowered himself into. Bob had stationed himself solidly to the right, a cannon even more big-arse than Yattaran's chair perched nonchalantly on his shoulder. Personally, I thought the cannon was overdoing it.

'Sorry darlin',' I grinned to myself, ' but you can't fight the laws of nature. Not my fault I've got the most kissable mug in the sector.'

A chorus of retching sounded across the channel, along with the high tinkle of Kei, laughing.

'Get off the damn comms!' Yattaran barked over the snorts and sniggers.

'Aye sir,' I replied, sarcastic emphasis on the _sir._ 'Just don't forget to ask if any of 'em can cook. If I have to swallow one more mouthful of Santo's beans – '

'That's not all you'll be swallowing,' Santo chimed in, 'once I make you my bitch.'

'Oh yeah?' I said.

'Oh yeah,' Santo said.

'Oh for fuck's sake,' Yattaran groaned over an even louder round of guffaws.

'We heard you're recruiting,' one of the four hopefuls suddenly called out. 'Take us with you!'

That shut us all up. I turned again to the potentials, focused my gaze on the one who had spoken up so presumptively. He was your average Meldar grifter, struggle etched hard on his face along with an unappetising element of ego and arrogance. I didn't like the look of him. And I didn't like the annoying bandanna that was tied around his annoying head.

If I had to choose, Tubby was my pick. The expression of befuddled innocence that was plastered across his chubby face indicated an eagerness to please – he'd be easy to order around, and he looked like he definitely knew his way around a kitchen. He perched next to Bandanna, swaying in the breeze as the layer of flab around his middle drifted according to its own unseen tide.

But it didn't matter what I thought. Or what I wanted. The outcome all depended on the Answer.

Yattaran chuckled to himself inside his armour and leaned pompously forward in his chair to contemplate the four hopefuls that balanced precariously on the tongues of the ramp's locking mechanism, their hands folded atop their heads and only the soles of their boots keeping them from falling into the void.

' _We only need one,'_ he announced, his voice booming from the armour's speaker and modulated down a range. The green dial of his faceplate surveyed the potentials with cool and menacing purpose as he prepared to ask the Question, and then turned decisively to Bandanna.

' _Answer me,'_ Yattaran said. _'For what reason do you want to board this ship?'_

It was a ludicrous sight. Bandanna, undoubtedly the scourge of the streets of Heavy Meldar, with his hands clasped behind his head and the hairs of his armpits waving in the wind as he tried to pull the Answer to the Question out of the myriad responses that must have been flooding through his brain.

Tubby shot him a look, a patent 'what the fuck are we doing here?', and Bandanna glanced back at him, wavered on his feet, and pulled the wrong answer out of his head.

'Fame!' he said.

Yattaran's contented sigh filtered through the helmet comms. He raised a hand and gave the signal, and I could almost hear the smile spread across his face as Bandanna's perch fell away and the first potential dropped screaming into space. Tubby peered over the edge to watch his friend go, the motion tilting him off-balance so that he swayed first one way and then the other as he tried to regain his balance. I held my breath with something that I'm ashamed to admit was anticipation, fully expecting him to fall headlong into space. But a moment or two of wavering and finally he was secure again on his perch and Yattaran had left his chair and was up close and in his face.

' _Why do you want to board this ship?'_

Tubby smiled, ducked his head apologetically and said the best most stupid thing he could possibly think of. 'Money?'

This time it was me who sighed. In disappointment. Yattaran gave the signal and I watched as my hopes dropped flailing away.

It was clear by now that the next candidate down the line, the one I'd mentally christened the Weasel, had crapped his pants, and it was no surprise that no Answer was forthcoming. But I don't think any of us expected the Weasel to be upended by his own terror and topple screaming over the edge before the Question could even be asked. His thin, drawn-out wail was audible for six long seconds before it ended as abruptly as it began.

A shadow moved on the gantry behind me and I glanced back briefly – Harlock – but my attention was now all for the kid. For the first time he looked concerned, his gaze darting around at the faceless armoured suits that were crowded around him. He looked at Yattaran, and then past him, the pale eyes fixing intently on Harlock where he watched, silent, from the upper deck. And then Yattaran was in the kid's face, up close, and waiting for the Answer.

The kid faltered, hesitated just one second too long, and Yattaran had lost his patience three recruits ago. Yattaran raised an arm into the air and sliced it ceremoniously to the side. There was a glimpse of the kid's pale face in the split second that realisation hit, and then his voice rang out, loud and clear and freezing us all in our tracks.

' _Freedom!'_

Too late. The deck fell abruptly out from beneath him, his feet suspended in space and his hands flailing hopelessly for a grasp on thin air.

The kid screamed. A guttural wail that dopplered away at the same speed as his flailing hands disappeared over the lip of the ramp, followed by an unexpected blur of movement on the deck.

Kei darted suddenly forward, one hand reaching over the edge and preventing the kid from disappearing completely into the void. I felt like kicking her.

'Name?' she demanded as the kid hung in the air, suspended in her grip with his feet swaying precariously in the wind.

'Yama,' he said.

She heaved, tossing him bodily back into the cargo hold. A whoof of air exploded from his lungs as he slammed onto the deck, the momentum sprawling him winded at our feet.

Kei turned, retracting her helmet to let her hair dance in the wind. 'Don't forget what you said,' she told him as he sprawled there blinking. 'It's the standard of this ship.'

Yattaran muttered a curse beneath his breath as his own helmet retracted. 'You look after him,' he said to Kei, loud enough for the kid to hear.

'Why?' she challenged, pelvis arching forward in that way she had of signalling trouble.

'You saved him,' Yattaran gruffed,'you take the responsibility.'

He was right. Kei had made the choice, so technically the kid was her problem. She knew the rules. But she argued, as she always does, while the kid crawled stiff to his knees and bay door hissed closed on its hydraulics and Yattaran absolved himself of any responsibility by sauntering casually away. I followed in his wake because, like Yattaran had just said, the kid was Kei's problem. But Harlock still watched from the upper deck, with more interest than I'd seen him take in anything for more time than I cared to remember.

I glanced back. The kid was still struggling to his feet, the process made all the more difficult by Kei's impatient prodding at his back, and his legs still shaking from having dangled weightless in mid-air. He teetered off-kilter, looked up, and his eyes locked with the captain's.

I watched as recognition passed across the kid's face, his skin paling a shade just before his lips tightened in determination, and I understood in that moment that he wasn't going to just be Kei's problem.

He was going to be everybody's problem.

* * *

 _A thousand thanks go to Helen Fayle, for keeping the faith and for providing the name of Ali (among other things) from the 2013 movie production notes. Ali is the chunky blond-haired crewman in the CGI movie who gets not enough screen time but just enough action to get the imagination going. And while 'Ali' is a perfectly serviceable name for the handsome SOB, for the purposes of this story I decided he might wear Ari/Aristotle better…_


End file.
